I am fairly new to programming and for my cs class i need to run individual programs. they don’t need to interact with anything else, so i am trying to just run the file I’m currently on but Kate just greys out the option. I really want to avoid using projects if i can because they’re just extra effort for no reason when I only need to run a single file. I did try using one, but Kate doesn’t have a new project button for some reason and i had some trouble with Cmake.

I’m aware that these are actually pretty basic things, but I can’t find anything online that actually explains how to use Kate at all. I would try using something else, but every IDE seems to have this same issue where by default it can’t run code and it has no documentation of any kind regarding actually running code, so i’ll just stick with the one that came with my distro.

also as a bonus question, why does every IDE seem to require you to configure every single option before it can run code and why do they all seem to discourage doing anything less than making an entire app?

  • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
    1·
    8 days ago

    In that case I would recommend using an IDE that supports C well. On Windows Visual Studio will get you far and it is the easiest to set up with wizards to create projects etc.

    Alternatively you could use VSCode but it’s a bit harder to set up.

    1. Install VSCode
    2. Install the clangd extension from the marketplace. It’s better than the official Microsoft C++ one.
    3. Also install the CMake extension.
    4. Create a CMake project by hand (you need CMakelists.txt and main.c). In the CMake make sure you add
    set(CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS TRUE)

    That will give you perfect code intelligence (error squiggles etc).