Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Installing ecb on Ubuntu Natty

OS: Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal
Kernel: 2.6.39-02063901-generic
Date: July 19th 2011

 Few days back I came across ecb (emacs code browser), really neat tool if you want to manage bigger project. However if you try to install ecb (ohh yes its in repository) there will be errors for dependencies, now the problem is these dependencies are not available in repository. Why so? Well, all these dependencies are part of Emacs however ecb (which is available in repository) doesn't seem to know about them. Check here.
 ecb development team seems to know the issue so they are probably providing support till next release however if you are willing to have it right away then follow further:


  •  Get current snapshot of ecb from CVS link.
  •  Extract it to any folder of your choice. 
  •  Create or Open ~/.emacs for editing.
  •  vi ~/.emacs
  •  Add following line to .emacs
  •  add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/installation/directory/ecb-snap")
  • (require 'ecb) 
  • Re/Start emacs.
  • M-x ecb-activate would activate project management features.


 While playing around with ecb I came across two other good packages which are worth mentioning:
 color-theme to have different color schemes for editing as per your liking, here is one I liked.
 verilog-mode to support verilog keywords and coding style.
 And many more .emacs manipulations.

Got a tip from: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3134026/emacs-23-2-with-ecb-2-40-file-error-cannot-open-load-file-semantic-ctxt