ez—for the Programmer

ez has support to assist you in finding compile errors. This is done by invoking make, capturing the output and then asking ez to show you the source lines in error. This is done by creating a second window of the source (select New Window on the Window menu card). In either of the source windows, select Start Compile on the Make menu card. You can see the results in Figure 6. When the compile completes and there are errors, select Next Error on the Make menu card. ez will then switch files to the offending file (if necessary) and show the line identified in error by the compiler. Correct the errors and start the process over again.

Figure 6a. Finding compile errors

Figure 6b.Compile errors

Sometimes just having the editor format the source helps to understand the code. The first time I used ez on my C source, I immediately noticed that some code was shown as comments. “Ha! A bug in ez”, I thought. Well, there was a bug, but not in ez. I discovered I had missed an ending comment delimiter in a program that I thought was working. I actually had 10 lines of code commented out. That was enough to convince me of the value of views in ez.

Figure 7. Compressing lines in source program

ez is not a complete source browser in the sense of some commercial applications, but rather it provides a set of functions to help you to navigate through your source. Sometimes you don't want to see some parts of your program. Highlight that part of your program with the mouse and select Compress region on the Source Text menu card and you will see something like that shown in Figure 7. If you click in the “compressed lines” box, the code will be shown again. Selecting Decompress all on the Source Text menu card will expand all compressed source areas.

The program ctags is a program found on most Unix systems. It will generate a file called tags which contains cross-reference information on the functions within a set of source files. You can also get cross-reference information on variables by issuing the command “ctags -v *.h *.c”. ez can use this file to show you where functions or variables are defined. Load the tags file by selecting the menu item Load New Tag File or Rebuild Tag File on the Tags menu card. To find where a variable or function is defined, select the variable with your mouse and select Find Tag on the Tags menu card. ez will switch to the file where this is defined and show you the line where it is defined.

So far we have been talking about editing existing source files. ez provides additional support when you edit a new, non-existent source file, by providing a means for you to control a “template” or default file. Each language has its own template file which can be found in /usr/andrew/lib/tpls. You can tailor your own by creating your own template directory and telling AUIS applications where your templates are by defining the

TEMPLATEPATH environment variable. To set this up, issue the following commands:

mkdir $HOME/tpls
cp /usr/andrew/lib/tpls/c.tpl $HOME/tpls
export TEMPLATEPATH=${HOME}/tpls:/usr/andrew/lib/tpls   # For bash/ksh
setenv TEMPLATEPATH ${HOME}/tpls:/usr/andrew/lib/tpls   # For
csh/tcsh

Figure 8. Template for C language source file

Now you can edit your own $HOME/tpls/c.tpl template and tailor this to your needs. Figure 8 shows you one such template. What you will see is much like a conventional program source, and indeed, it is. This is where you put your own “boiler-plate”; code you'd want in most any program. More interesting, however, is the existence of dogtags (what's in a name?). These are fields, delimited with “<@” and “@>”, which are automatically substituted when the template is loaded. For instance in Figure 8, you see <@name@>, which is replaced with the name of the file being edited (fig1.c). Most of these are pretty obvious. For a complete list of all dogtags, see the help text shown by the command auishelp dogtags.