I work a lot on Ubuntu, and Linux is one of the targets of Minko. As soon as Github’s Atom was released, I wanted to test it as an actual development environment for such C++ applications.
Here are two plugins I think are major additions to Atom for C++ development.
autocomplete-clang
Autocomplete is a major feature for any IDE. In the case of C++, it’s even more important because of the complexity of the language. The autocomplete-clang plugin uses clang static analysis to parse headers. It then extends Atom’s autocomplete feature to properly autocomplete C++.
The plugin works great. It’s less tightly integrated than VisualStudio’s Intellisense. So it’s not as fast. Still, the lack of speed is not a big issue compared to the ease the plugin brings. Using pre-compiled headers should speed things up, but I haven’t tried them yet: I guess it says a lot about how not much of a problem this lack of performance might be…
linter-clang
Compiling your code to check its syntax is not a very efficient process. You keep Alt-Tabing between your editor and the terminal where you run compilation. It’s a given clang’s output is a lot more readable than GCC’s. Still, it’s not as integrated as VisualStudio real-time analysis.
The linter-clang plugin fixes that. Once again, it uses clang’s static analysis to check your code and properly report errors in real-time. No need to try to compile your code: linter-clang will check for errors as you type and will report them visually directly in the editor, just like Eclipse or VisualStudio do it.
Using those plugins with Minko
Both those plugins will need to call clang with the proper flags. And those flags depend on your very project. In the case of autocomplete-clang, those flags can be setup in a .clang_complete files at the root of your project (this method is actually inspired from Vim’s popular clang autocomplete plugin). But linter-clang does not support .clang_complete files, so I made a patch available here (that patch will hopefully be merged soon as you can read here).
To generate such .clang_complete files, Minko’s build system has been updated with a “clang-complete” action. This action will automatically create the .clang_complete files for each Minko project (the core framework, the plugins, the tutorials…) or your own project with a single command line :
premake5 clang-complete
Instead of solution/project files, this premake action will generate .clang_complete files with each project’s specific flags.