Hey gang,
I've started a wiki page for the LaunchBar. It is here:
https://wiki.eclipse.org/CDT/LaunchBar. It's still a work in progress but if you look in the launch folder in our git repo, you'll see the new plug-ins.
One of the key UX features of the LaunchBar is the ability to Build and Launch without the user ever having to go to the launch config dialog. Yes, this is very similar to the launch shortcut that does it based on selection, but this has a friendlier face and
you always know what's about to be built and launched.
There is a lot of the launch shortcut that we can use (CApplicationLaunchShortcut), but it itself has issues. For one, it only works if it can figure out the IBinary. The LaunchBar has a build button which means build for launch, but at that point it's assumed
we don't have an IBinary, but we need the launch config so we can call buildForLaunch() on the delegate. So we have a chicken and egg problem. We somewhat got away with it in the shortcut since we really only were launching, but the LaunchBar now has an explicit
UI for the build. Has anyone tried to resolve that?
The shortcut also requires the active build config and the debugger. The LaunchBar has an active launch mode and an active target, so in theory we should be able to automatically figure that out. While I'm pretty sure I can figure out the build side looking
at the configurations, we've never done a good job of linking that to the debugger. The question is do we add the debugger to the IToolChain as a ITool? or do we need a higher level concept like QtCreator's Kits. Other ideas?
I'm also interested in people's opinions in general on the LaunchBar in general. The key philosophy is that hitting the buttons always does the thing that makes the most sense. And you should never have to go to the launch config dialogs unless you want to
do something advanced. We may be missing something in our models and if so, we should add it in.
Thanks,
Doug.