Extending EDE (Emacs Development Environment)

8 Extending EDE

This chapter is intended for users who want to write new parts or fix bugs in EDE. A knowledge of Emacs Lisp, and some EIEIO(CLOS) is required.

EDE uses EIEIO, the CLOS package for Emacs, to define two object superclasses, specifically the PROJECT and TARGET. All commands in EDE are usually meant to address the current project, or current target.

All specific projects in EDE derive subclasses of the EDE superclasses. In this way, specific behaviors such as how a project is saved, or how a target is compiled can be customized by a project author in detail. EDE communicates to these project objects via an API using methods. The commands you use in EDE mode are high-level functional wrappers over these methods. See EIEIO manual for details on using EIEIO to extending classes, and writing methods.

If you intend to extend EDE, it is most likely that a new target type is needed in one of the existing project types. The rest of this chapter will discuss extending the ede-project class, and its targets. See project-am.el for basic details on adding targets to it.

For the ede-project type, the core target class is called ede-proj-target. Inheriting from this will give you everything you need to start, including adding your sources into the makefile. If you also need additional rules in the makefile, you will want to inherit from ede-proj-target-makefile instead. You may want to also add new fields to track important information.

If you are building currently unsupported code into a program or shared library, it is unlikely you need a new target at all. Instead you would need to create a new compiler or linker object that compiles source code of the desired type. Compiler and Linker objects.

Once your new class exists, you will want to fill in some basic methods. See the ede-skel.el file for examples of these. The files ede-proj-info.el and ede-proj-elisp.el are two interesting examples.