The editor is a central component of WipeOut. You use it for source code editing and whenever another component needs to show a file or to know a source code position it uses the editor. This is one of the basic concepts of WipeOut: only one central text editor.

This causes a very high integration of the editor into the development environment. That's why it is not possible to use another editor within WipeOut. This seems to be a great disadvantage because the most of the developers have their own favourite editor and it's not easy to turn to another one. But this way it is possible to integrate such features as the symbol completion: If you press 'Ctrl-.' in the editor it will try to complete the word you are writing currently. Therefor it uses the database of the Class Browser and looks for a matching class, method or member name.

Another nifty feature is the integrated man page viewer: If you select a symbol in the Text-Editor and press 'Ctrl-m' the SurfBoard will show the related man page if there is one. In the near future we will extend this to info pages and external HTML-documentations.

Syntax Highlighting

The highlighting of syntactical elements increases the readability of source code. The WipeOut-editor uses regular expressions to do that. The syntax is similar to the 'grep'-command. The documentation of WipeOut contains a general overview of the meta-symbols. This kind of highlighting slows down the editor a little bit but it gives you the flexibility to create your own highlighting style.

A style is a set of a regular expression, a file pattern, a color and a font. Each style highlights a special syntactical element specified by the regular expression in the given color and font, but only in those files, which match the file pattern. You can create and edit styles with Properties->Highlighting.

The editor has default styles for C++, Java, Objective-C, LaTeX and HTML. You can use this styles as they are, but you can also change them. There is a lot of space for experiments.

Beside the styles there are some other parameters: various colors, tabs, undo-depth, font sizes, etc. Finally the editor is very easy to use, so that there shouldn't be to big problems.

The Make-Shell

But now back to our mini-project: after creating files, adding them to a module, working with the Class Browser and the Text-Editor it's time to compile the program.

WipeOut uses make to compile your projects. Normally all necessary files will be created automaticly based on the module information. Each module has three different parts for the makefile:

• Makefile.inc: contains various symbol definitions, e.g. each category gets a symbol, which contains the files of the category. The makefile uses this symbols to determine, which files to compile for a special target. This file will be updated continuously be WipeOut and you should not edit it.
• <arch>.def: contains platform depending parameters. '<arch>' will be replaced by the OS-name, e.g. Linux. When you develop a project with WipeOut across various platforms this file helps you to make the platform specific compiler settings.
• Makefile: This is the makefile itself. It includes 'Makefile.inc' and '<arch>.def'. You can edit it for adding other than the default targets. The Make-Shell will call make with this file. The makefile contains default rules to compile C-, C++-, Java- and flex-sources. It has targets to build C/C++- and Java-programs and static or shared libraries.

To start make we open the Make-Shell with the 5th button of the Project Browser. This dialog has only a few elements: the Start-button to start make, an edit field to set a special target (an empty field means the default target - 'cplusplus') and two checkboxes. Normally