The purpose of this repository is to provide high level instructions for a class leader to set up a modern cpp IDE on stuudent computers that is both free and runs on Windows. This tutorial is a written set of instructions which works on Windows of Baris Yuksel’s excellent videos. Links to the original videos are given below:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTUE03LnaXA
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_HW0EB67eY
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ib914gNr0ys
If you are a visual learner, I hope that my accompanying videos will help you as well.
Windows is terrible. Proprietary software is worse. This project should be viewed through the lens of ‘harm reduction programs.’ The best thing by far is to implore students to get off windows like they were getting off of Heroin.
However most Computer Science students (girls as well as boys) come to us after a decade of gaming. Can I play Halo if I switch to Ubuntu? Is there a version of Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty for Debian? Explaining the virtues of Free Software has not worked for me. I even showed students Richard Stallman’s excellent (and brief) TedX talk available at the url below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag1AKIl_2GM
The reactions I received were simmilar to exposing them to a Bernie Sander’s rally. “That is a cool old dude. Am I going to change my life? No.”
Visual Studio costs $800. So, probably students will only see it in campus labs. Most lab administrators are too busy to configure software for classroom use–for example, Visual Studio has an AStyle plugin to write styled code, but on our lab computers this was never installed, let alone configured.
To save money, many students use Bloodshed’s Dev-C++. This has not been maintained for 10 years and there are more than 340 known unfixed bugs. See the url below for more detail.
http://clicktobegin.net/programming/why-you-shouldnt-use-dev-c/
If you are gong to make an IDE recommendation to students, it should be http://www.codeblocks.org. It is free and currently maintained. I just don’t think C/C++ will be the only language they will ever need and Emacs can emulate many of the features and students will be able to reuse the same style on the next language (Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, Scala, Java or Node).
If students will not leave proprietary software alone, I still want
them to learn posix style command line driven development. Here is my
zero cost and Free Solution, directed at instructors running a class,
rather than at students themselves–installing this requires using
elisp to load packages and configure packages and python to run
cpplint. (Students who can configure a system that requires two
languages other than C++ should be taking a higher level course.)
The hacker’s editor. You can use it for 30 years. The best way for windows users to get it is via:
http://vgoulet.act.ulaval.ca/en/emacs/windows/
This has been operationalized in a python package (library) called cpplint that is freely available. Google’s style guide is somewhat controversial in the C++ community: see the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOCElcMcFik for its philosophy and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7900238 for a critique of it. What is not in doubt, though, is that successful projects adhere to a style: if you watch only one video linked here, watch Greg Hartman-Kroah’s “I Don’t Want Your Code”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMeH7wqOwXA.
We install auto-complete with semantic parsing for a back end. We also make auto-complete aware of our compiler include files.
These instructions do not cover all possible scenarios. Emacs packages change version numbers, for example; be prepared to do some minor tweaking.
Students learn to be comortable on the command line and can add familiarity with many open source tools incrementally such as gdb and valgrind.
First install modified Emacs for windows from:
http://vgoulet.act.ulaval.ca/en/emacs/windows/
Select all of the defaults. It has a one click installer. Emacs is now installed. We will need this tool to configure the rest of the packages we will install.
Second, install Cygwin. Cygwin can be confusing. First, you have to decide whether to install the 32 bit or 64 bit version. It depends on your operating system, I need to add how to tell in windows 8/10 and links to Cygwin. (TODO) It only installs a base package on default and there is no repo management system. Instead, to install additional packages, repeat the installation process, but when you come to the screen below search for the new program and left-click skip to download the binary of that program. For our base install you should find g++, make, cmake and gdb.
Third, to make linux utilities available from any path, you will need to modify the PATH environment variable. You can not permanently modify the PATH variable from the cmd shell in windows; you will need to use the GUI instead. (You could instead use version 3 of the Powershell but not every student will have that and the syntax is awkward.)
To do this (more details below), go to Control Panel (this has been in every version of Windows since NT).
Find or select System Properties; in the Advanced tab, click
Environmental Variables. On the next screen, if
given a choice you want System variables, not the ones just for the user. Find the PATH
and copy the variable value to a file in emacs (I use the filename path_scratch). Make a copy
and add the path to cygwin at the end.
Instead go to Control Panel which exists in every version of Windows
since NT. Find or select Advanced System Settings and Select
Environmental Variables. If given a choice you want System variable
not for just the user. Find the PATH and copy the variable value to a
file in emacs. I use pathScratch. Make a copy and add the path to
cygwin at the end. Here is my modified windows path. (Note that
Cygwin is installed in C:\, not C:/Program Files. The binary
versions of programs are in C:\Cygwin\bin which is what you need to
add to the path. It can also be C:\Cygwin64\bin if you installed the
64 bit version of Cygwin. Here is my modified windows path:
%SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;%SYSTEMROOT%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\%SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;%SYSTEMROOT%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;c:\cygwin\binHere is the screen where you can change the environmental variable in Windows. In the next three images we display the Advanced System Variables, the Environmental Variables and finally the path selection. The path will normally extend far beyond the borders. My advice, is do not try to attempt to edit the path there but rather copy it to Emacs where adding the path to C:/Cygwin/bin is easy.
Click on environmental variables and the next screen appears:
You will have to scroll in the system variables to find the PATH variable.
Here are the tricks of Emacs and Windows CUA to successfully copy and edit the path.
- Find
path_scratchin the usual wayC-x C-f path_scratch. - This brings up a blank file
- Go to the Edit System Variable
- Press C-a to select all of the variable value
- Press C-c to copy the value to the windows clipboard
- Put the cursor back in Emacs in the pathScratch file. C-y called yank to paste the variable back in Emacs.
- Notice that each place the path searches is separated by a semi-colon
- Make sure to put a semi-colon before new path.
- Add the C:/Cygwin/bin to the path in Emacs
- Click Ok on all of the winows.
- Close the old command window and open a new one.
- Linux utilities such as ‘ls’ now work in the command shell from any directory
We need python to use cpplint which will give us our styling. We also have to install setup tools, pip and virtualenv. First go to the main python site:
https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/
As of this writing the latest release in the 2.7.x series is 2.7.10. Select that release for windows. Be sure to select the 32-bit or 64-bit version, depending on your machine (in Windows 10, I only need to search system properties. See information below:
Click on the appropriate python:
This will install python in C:/Python27. We now need to go back to the Environmental variables and add c:/Python27 to the path in the same way as before.
Open a new cmd window. Type python. You should be taken into the python cmd interpreter. Type quit() and continue.
Run a cmd shell as administrator. Navigate to the python27 directory make a directory for scripts. Make a scripts directory if it does not exist. See the screenshot below:
you can then download the following two files:
https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
Copy these files to C:/Python27/Scripts. See the screen shot below:
You can then run them in the way shown below:
python ez_setup.py
python get-pip.py
pip install virtualenvIt is generally good practice to set up a virtual environment in Python:
cd c:/Users/evan/Documents
mkdir myVenv
cd myVenv
virtualenv lint
lint/Scripts/activateThe prompt should change and have a begin with ‘(lint)’. We can now install a python program to check our C++ style
pip install cpplintGo get a glass of water. Everything else is in Emacs.
I am not sure if I should copy the text here verbatim or I should tell
the reader to take a second and read https://kb.iu.edu/d/aghb. It
explains the key strokes we will need to describe. Assuming you have
read it, Let’s tye C x C f to find a new file and make sure it is in
your home directory. The line in the small space at the bottom of
Emacs called the mini-buffer should read:
~/.emacs
Now following the convention in https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit add marmalade to your .emacs file.
(require 'package)
(add-to-list 'package-archives '("marmalade" . "https://marmalade-repo.org/packages/"))
(add-to-list 'package-archives '("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/"))
(package-initialize)Now we can define some new packages and install them automatically.
(defvar my-packages '(iedit auto-complete ac-c-headers flymake-google-cpplint flymake-cursor google-c-style color-theme-sanityinc-solarized))
(dolist (p my-packages)
(when (not (package-installed-p p))
(package-install p)))Next we add the configuration. You need to substitute your students windows user name
where you see <user>. The <> brackets are an indicator of a parameter and should
not be included. The backets are in the third block of code
(global-ede-mode 1)
(require 'semantic/sb)
(semantic-mode 1)
(require 'iedit)
(require 'auto-complete)
(global-auto-complete-mode t)
(require 'auto-complete-config)
(add-to-list 'ac-dictionary-directories "C:/Users/<user>/.emacs.d/elpa/auto-complete-20150618.1949/dict")
(set-default 'ac-c-sources
'(ac-source-abbrev
ac-source-dictionary
ac-source-yasnippet
ac-source-words-in-buffer
ac-source-words-in-same-mode-buffers
ac-source-semantic))
(ac-config-default)
(defun my:add-semantic-to-autocomplete()
(add-to-list 'ac-sources 'ac-sources-semantic)
)
(add-hook 'c-mode-common-hook 'my:add-semantic-to-autocomplete)
(add-hook 'c++-mode-common-hook 'my:add-semantic-to-autocomplete)
In order to complete the headers for the student. You need to determine where they are located. Since we have loaded g++ from cygwin and changed our path we can execute the following at the command prompt:
gcc -xc++ -E -v -Use the result to modify the include directories:
(defun my:ac-c-header-init ()
(require 'auto-complete-c-headers)
(add-to-list 'ac-sources 'ac-source-c-headers)
(add-to-list 'achead:include-directories '"C:\cygwin\/usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-cygwin/4.9.3/include")
)
(add-hook 'c-mode-hook 'my:ac-c-header-init)
(add-hook 'c++-mode-hook 'my:ac-c-header-init)In the next function we use the operating system to set the command for executing cpplint each time we open a cpp file in Emacs. Unfortunately this is also path dependant so we use <user> to indicate a parameter that needs to be changed.
(defun my:flymake-google-init()
(require 'flymake-google-cpplint)
(custom-set-variables
'(flymake-google-cpplint-command "c:/Users/<user>/Documents/eip/lint/Scripts/cpplint.exe"))
(flymake-google-cpplint-load)
(require 'flymake-cursor)
)
(add-hook 'c-mode-hook 'my:flymake-google-init)
(add-hook 'c++-mode-hook 'my:flymake-google-init)Next we add semantic as a backend to autocomplete. And declare a project in ede mode so that auto complete will even work on user defined
(defun my:add-semantic-to-autocomplete()
(add-to-list 'ac-sources 'ac-source-semantic)
)
(add-hook 'c-mode-common-hook 'my:add-semantic-to-autocomplete)
(add-hook 'c++-mode-common-hook 'my:add-semantic-to-autocomplete)
(global-ede-mode 1)
;; create a project for our program.
(ede-cpp-root-project "hash" :file "C:/Users/<user>/Documents/hash/src/main.cpp"
:include-path '("../my_inc"))
;; you can use system-include-path for setting up the system header file locations.
;; turn on automatic reparsing of open buffers in semantic
(global-semantic-idle-scheduler-mode 1)The file also has to be changed but it will allow you test the set up.
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