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KDevelop is a free IDE for GNU/Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. KDevelop 3.0 was a complete rewrite of KDevelop 2. It was released together with KDE 3.2 in February 2004. KDevelop is licensed under the GPL license.
KDevelop does not include a compiler; instead, it uses the GNU Compiler Collection (or, optionally, another compiler) to produce executable code.
The current version, 3.3, supports many programming languages such as Ada, Bash, C, C++, Fortran, Java, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and SQL.
Features
KDevelop uses an embedded text editor component through KPart technology. The default editor is KDE Advanced Text Editor. This list focuses on the features of KDevelop itself. For features specific to the editor component, see the article on Kate.
* Source code editor with syntax highlighting and automatic indentation (Kate).
* Project management for different project types, such as Automake, qmake for Qt based projects and Ant for Java based projects.
* Class browser.
* Front-end for the GNU Compiler Collection.
* Front-end for the GNU Debugger.
* Wizards for generating and updating class definitions and application framework.
* Automatic code completion (C/C++).
* Built-in Doxygen support.
* Revision control (also known as SCM) support. Supported systems include CVS, Subversion , Perforce and ClearCase.
KDevelop 3 is a completely plugin-based architecture. When a developer makes a change, he only has to compile the plugin. There is a possibility to keep several profiles each of which determines which plugins to be loaded. KDevelop does not come with a text editor, but instead uses a plugin for this purpose as well. KDevelop is programming language and build system-independent, supporting KDE, GNOME, and many other technologies such as Qt, GTK+, and wxWidgets.
KDevelop has a variety of supported languages, including C, C++, Perl, Python, PHP, Java, Fortran, Ruby, Ada, Pascal, SQL, and Bash scripting. Supported build systems include GNU (automake), qmake, and make for custom projects (KDevelop does not destroy your own Makefiles if that's what you want to use) and scripting projects which don't need one.
Code completion is available for C and C++. Symbols are kept in a Berkeley DB file for quick lookups without re-parsing. In contrast to other free IDEs and editors (as of 2006-12-10), whose source code analyzation is based on simple parsers which heuristically analyze the code, upcoming versions of KDevelop will feature exact parsers for C++ and other programming languages, which cover the languages syntax much more closely. This enables more precise and context aware syntax highlighting and code completion, for example the tracing of variable definitions and corresponding variable use. KDevelop also offers a developer framework which helps to write new parsers for other programming languages.
An integrated debugger lets you graphically do all the debugging with breakpoints and backtraces. It even works with dynamically loaded plugins unlike command line gdb.
Quick Open allows quick navigation between files.
Currently, 50 to 100 plugins exist for the IDE. Major ones include persistent project-wide code bookmarks, Code abbreviations which let you quickly expand text, a Source formatter which reformats your code to a style guide before it is saved, Regular expressions search, and project-wide search/replace which helps with refactoring code.
This entry uses material from from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. Disclaimer.