IDE or a set of tools for chess coding

[JohnWoe]

git is only needed in team. Much easier to store tarballs than mess with git diffs.

That is an insane perspective.

git isn't some God given tool.

[AndrewGrant]

git is only needed in team. Much easier to store tarballs than mess with git diffs.

That is an insane perspective.

git isn't some God given tool.

Certainly not. But duplicating your source directories, and then renaming it something else, is grade-schoolers manage versions of their book reports. You'll never keep track of everything meaningfully that way. Git and svn are the most widely accepted. But you can find alternatives if you don't want to learn them.

[AndrewGrant]

To answer the actual thread:

In the Windows days, I mostly got by with notepad++, git-bash, and the mingw tool chain.

Nowadays, I use Windows as my primary desktop just because of the difficulty in moving everything to Linux, but my entire dev env is in various WSL instances, usually running Ubuntu or Alpine Linux. Here you get access to all your standard linux utilities for your troubles... gdb, valgrind, better profilers, etc.

I still use Notepad++ though. If I was on a full linux system, I'm not sure what IDE I like. Gedit or Geany is a safe start. But really I need two important features, which I don't know where they exist in others tools: [1] (Easy to find) multi-line editing support, just by holding alt. [2] (Hard to find) The ability to fold/unfold the N-th level of code. In np++ thats alt+N and shift+alt+N. Without that, its too hard to take on massive files without a full on IDE.

[BeyondCritics]

git is only needed in team. Much easier to store tarballs than mess with git diffs.

That is an insane perspective.

git isn't some God given tool.

You probably misread what i have written about git. It is not that i wanted to claim that it is insanely good, but it is the "de facto" standard for every open source developer. And i see, you are referencing some github url, so you are using it yourself! Thats all i wanted to tell on a starter question.

[JohnWoe]

git is only needed in team. Much easier to store tarballs than mess with git diffs.

That is an insane perspective.

git isn't some God given tool.

You probably misread what i have written about git. It is not that i wanted to claim that it is insanely good, but it is the "de facto" standard for every open source developer. And i see, you are referencing some github url, so you are using it yourself! Thats all i wanted to tell on a starter question.

Yes for open source developer. I just share some code on github that's about it. Vim with persistent undo + vimdiff is good enough "version control system" for me. I like to keep things as simple as possible. If you are using Linux you are not cloning the massive 100s of TiB git history. You will take the 50MiB zip package.

When I was developing 8.2 I made tons of changes and some strange bug appeared. Instead of mastering some gdb tool. I simply took 8.1 as base. Then w/ vimdiff I only imported the good stuff. And then 8.2 kept beating 8.1 and the bug was gone. Very simple.

[BeyondCritics]

If you are using Linux you are not cloning the massive 100s of TiB git history. You will take the 50MiB zip package.

Use

git clone --depth 1 <NAME>

[AndrewGrant]

If you are using Linux you are not cloning the massive 100s of TiB git history. You will take the 50MiB zip package.

This strictly implies you are using git wrong. Git repos are very small, unless you are committing things that don't belong there, like engine binaries, massive data files, etc.

[Pali]

Yes for open source developer. I just share some code on github that's about it. Vim with persistent undo + vimdiff is good enough "version control system" for me. I like to keep things as simple as possible. If you are using Linux you are not cloning the massive 100s of TiB git history. You will take the 50MiB zip package.

I prefer my 18MB git repository over multiple 50MiB zip packages.

[Dann Corbit]

Revision control is a very good idea.
Many times, I have had chess program authors send me an email asking me for their source code.
Sounds corny, but maybe twenty times it has happened.
I used to compile programs for lots of people like Jim Ablett so I had a copy of the source for many programs.
Sometimes they would make a change and not know how to recover.
Sometimes they would get mad, delete their source, and then cool down.
Sometimes there was a hardware problem on their end.

Anyway, source control is a godsend. You not only have a stable way to store your code, but you can do versioning very easily, track changes, integrate with bug tracking, work cooperatively, formalize releases, branch, merge and the list goes on and on.

I would never give up source code control systems of some kind, and git is becoming dominant today.

Quite frankly, the sooner you become proficient with git, the sooner you will thank your lucky stars that you did.

IMO-YMMV

[smatovic]

To explore several different branches of ideas during my chess projects git was a blessing, to go back and forth in the development tree, to merge different ideas/branches, very effective, also for long term development, to recover some past code snippets and alike.

[...]
Many times, I have had chess program authors send me an email asking me for their source code.
[...]
Sometimes they would get mad, delete their source, and then cool down.
[...]

guilty as charged. thx!

***edit***

In principle it does not matter if CVS, SVN or git, the feature set is basically the same.

Currently I still use gedit, still have a complete switch to console with vim on todo list.

--
Srdja