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Tuesday, 17 May 2022

[6]Using the Free Pascal IDE for a week

[7]May 17, 2022 by [8]Chris Hawkins

Code can really be written with any text editor that you're comfortable
with. I tend to use [9]Vim for quick edits and writing notes, and on
Linux I occasionally use [10]Geany or [11]Mousepad. But when you want
to do more than quickly update a few files, you need a full Integrated
Development Environment (IDE).
An IDE understands the language that you're writing in, and can run
additional tools like a compiler and a debugger from the same
environment.

The most full featured IDE for Free Pascal, bar none, is [12]Lazarus.
The ease with which you can write, refactor, debug and compile programs
in Lazarus makes me miss it when I have to write code in another
language. It's fast and perfectly suited for the task... except in one
instance.
Lazarus is designed for coding GUI applications, but recently I've
spent most of my free time writing a terminal based game. It used to be
possible to run a terminal session 'attached' to Lazarus, so that it
could be debugged from the IDE, but since a previous update this always
seems to fail on my PC. I can still use Lazarus to write my code, but
when I encounter an error I need some other way to diagnose it.

Introducing FP IDE

[13][DefaultBlue.png]

I'm not sure what the rationale is for maintaining the text mode FP
IDE. It seems kinda quaint in 2022 to maintain a recreation of the old
Turbo Pascal editor, but I'm so glad that it's there. The IDE might not
have all the bells and whistles of something like Lazarus, but it's
lightweight, easy to use, and reliable. I first learned Pascal back in
the Borland days, so the IDE does feel familiar to me. Although I'm not
sure how a younger programmer, encountering it for the first time would
feel about it. Without the haze of experience and nostalgia informing
their opinion.

Regardless, it comes with Free Pascal and runs in the terminal. It does
require a little setting up first though. Note, I'm running Linux here
but the same should work in Windows with a little tweaking to use the
correct file paths. Also, I've found the best Linux terminal to run the
IDE in is Xterm. Other terminal emulators seem to catch your keyboard
commands for their own menus.

Setting it up

The first time that you run FP IDE it creates a couple of config files
in the starting directory, fp.cfg and fp.ini. The first thing that you
notice when opening the IDE is the retro, blue colour scheme. The
second thing that you'll notice is that it doesn't actually compile
Pascal programs out of the box.
I'm not sure why this is the default setup, but you need to tell the
IDE where to find the Free Pascal files on your system. A quick Google
search shows that this step trips a lot of people up, so let's kill two
birds with one stone and get both of these things resolved.

Open fp.cfg in a text editor and you'll see three sections:

#IFDEF NORMAL
#IFDEF DEBUG
#IFDEF RELEASE

These correspond to the different build profiles that you'll use.
Personally, I spend all my development time using the debug profile,
and then only use release at the very end of my development cycle.
In each section, add the following lines:

-Fu/usr/lib/fpc/$fpcversion/units/$fpctarget
-Fu/usr/lib/fpc/$fpcversion/units/$fpctarget/*
-Fu/usr/lib/fpc/$fpcversion/units/$fpctarget/rtl

You can also add this in the IDE itself in Options > Directories >
Units, but it's a little quicker to copy and paste this in a text
editor.
Unlike Lazarus, the FP IDE doesn't use 'Projects' where all of a
programs files are managed. Instead it deals with directories/folders.
If the program that you're working on has files stored in subfolders,
explicitly add them here. Each line begins with -Fu followed by the
full path to the directory, with no space after -Fu.
As an example, here's my fp.cfg file below.

# Automatically created file, don't edit.
#IFDEF NORMAL
-TLinux
-Mfpc
-Sg
-Si
-Os
-CpATHLON64
-OpCOREI
-Fu/home/cypher/Development/MyProg/
-Fu/home/cypher/Development/MyProg/AdditionalUnits
-Fu/usr/lib/fpc/$fpcversion/units/$fpctarget
-Fu/usr/lib/fpc/$fpcversion/units/$fpctarget/*
-Fu/usr/lib/fpc/$fpcversion/units/$fpctarget/rtl
-g-
-p-
-b-
#ENDIF
#IFDEF DEBUG
-TLinux
-Mfpc
-Sg
-Si
-Sa
-Cr
-Ci
-Co
-CR
-Os
-CpATHLON64
-OpCOREI
-Fu/home/cypher/Development/MyProg/
-Fu/home/cypher/Development/MyProg/AdditionalUnits
-Fu/usr/lib/fpc/$fpcversion/units/$fpctarget
-Fu/usr/lib/fpc/$fpcversion/units/$fpctarget/*
-Fu/usr/lib/fpc/$fpcversion/units/$fpctarget/rtl
-g
-p-
-b-
#ENDIF
#IFDEF RELEASE
-TLinux
-Mfpc
-Sg
-Si
-CX
-Os
-CpATHLON64
-OpCOREI
-Fu/home/cypher/Development/MyProg/
-Fu/home/cypher/Development/MyProg/AdditionalUnits
-Fu/usr/lib/fpc/$fpcversion/units/$fpctarget
-Fu/usr/lib/fpc/$fpcversion/units/$fpctarget/*
-Fu/usr/lib/fpc/$fpcversion/units/$fpctarget/rtl
-XS
-g-
-p-
-b-
#ENDIF

Some Quality of Life improvements

The next steps aren't necessary in order to use the IDE, but I find
that it makes it a more comfortable environment to work in.
If you're happy with the blue colour scheme, you can ignore this step.
Personally, I prefer something darker so I put together my own colour
palette. It's incomplete, but it's good enough to use day to day.
View the file at [14]https://github.com/cyberfilth/FP-IDE-theme and
paste the [Colors] section into your own fp.ini file.

[15][Themed.png]

The next thing that I do is download the help files, so that I can
access them through the IDE's built-in help viewer. The HTML
documentation can be downloaded from
[16]https://www.freepascal.org/down/docs/docs-canada.var then add them
in the IDE by going to Help > Files and adding the path to the HTML
files.

Now the IDE is set up. It took a little more work than opening Lazarus
for the first time, but now I can find bugs in my code a lot easier.
Until now I've been writing code in Lazarus and firing up the FP IDE
whenever I need to debug something. I did wonder though if I can just
use the FP IDE for everything.
Since I'm currently writing a [17]roguelike game, I thought that I'd
open it up in the IDE. Before doing that, I amended the main filename
from the Lazarus format to plain Pascal. That just means changing the
suffix .lpr to .pas.
Once the main program file is opened up, select it as the primary file.

[18][PrimaryFile.png]
One of the main differences in the interface, compared to Lazarus, is
that instead of a tabbed interface it has a series of windows. With the
right font size, I actually prefer this interface as it means that I
can see several related files on screen at once.

[19][Windows.png]

The biggest thing that I'm missing so far is a good auto complete. The
IDE will offer suggestions for completing Pascal keywords but, unlike
Lazarus, it won't try to autocomplete your own variables or procedure
names.

Regardless, I'm going to try and restrict myself to just using this IDE
for the next week to see if I can still use it for my hobby project. My
codebase is currently about 17,000 lines of code and I'm curious to see
what it's like to navigate it using the IDE... wish me luck!
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