I admit that I have (a few? or not so few) bad habits: one of it is that usually I find a way to do things, and if that works, I stick with it. I know that there are other ways to do things, but hey, why bother? And sometimes a good friend asks an excellent question (are there any bad questions?), and this let me review the way I’m doing things. And here is such a thing: exporting and importing projects in Eclipse.
Sometimes my embedded application is not doing what I want it to do. I can solve many problems with normal ‘step/stop mode debugging‘: setting breakpoints, step, stop, inspect data, and so on. But not always. If a piece of code is changing a global variable unintentionally, I do not know where to set my breakpoint. Something is changing my variable, and I have no clue from where. It could be a dangling pointer, a stack overflow or something similar which I cannot track down with code breakpoints. What I need is a breakpoint on data: watchpoints!
One of the new features in CodeWarrior for MCU10.2 is the ability to build in parallel. Does not sound exciting? Well, when I tried this the first time in MCU10.2, I noticed immediately the reduction in build time: twice as fast compared to MCU10.1!!!. Wow! This improvement is based on using a make utility which can spawn multiple jobs on multicore host machines. CodeWarrior tries to use an optimized setting to make the build as fast as possible using parallel builds. The question is: is it really optimal?
The article on 10 Best Eclipse Shortcuts lists many very useful shortcuts. But it is missing the Mother of all Shortcuts: Ctrl+Shift+L:
I just ran into this problem: I know I have this file in my project, but still the linker complains that it cannot find the symbols: “Symbol X is undefined”? It must be something obvious, but somehow I cannot see it?
Symbol Undefined Linker Error Message
Yes, eclipse is a very visual and GUI oriented IDE. But this does not mean that everything is mouse oriented. While programming I have my hands on the keyboard. So I want to do as much as possible with shortcuts and the keyboard. The good news is that eclipse comes with a great set of helpers built-in. Here is my list of my favorite hotkeys and shortcuts…
With “Eclipse and PC-lint: Linticator” I have a plugin to lint my sources in a comfortable way. But I can do this as well without a plugin. For this I use a batch file with a build configuration, plus settings to get the PC-lint messages into the Problems view. Yes, this does not sound easy, but is very doable and straight forward once I have set it up. It gives me complete control on every little detail. Here is how I do it… Continue reading
It is Easter time, and here is my Easter Gift in eclipse: Quick Access. If you are one of those developers who hate the mouse and want to do everything with your hands on the keyboard: this is definitely something for you. I admit that I had not noticed that feature, as it is buried behind menus. It is such a great functionality in eclipse (thanks for the hint, Teo!), but easily gets missed.
Eclipse is good, but like any other tool: it gets better after I have it customized for my special needs. Eclipse stores a lot of settings in the workspace, see my article about Copy my workspace settings. But is there a way to apply some settings to every workspace? At least to the new ones? Because importing/exporting the settings can get really tedious as I have many workspace. And indeed, there are global settings in eclipse. And I want to have them changed…
Ranked as number 3 on my list of eclipse plugins is something I missed in eclipse, but what I heavily use in Microsoft Visual Studio: The ability to search files anywhere on my computer. As outlined in Compare and Merge with Eclipse, eclipse is very workspace focused: I can only search files which are inside my workspace. Well, unless I use the System Search and Desktop Search plugins. They are not one of the usual plugins. Here is what you can get (or search) …
MCU on Eclipse 