EDE is an Emacs Lisp program which implements an environment similar to those found in IDEs (Integrated Development Environment). While Emacs is the premier development environment, and has lots of support for this activity, EDE brings many divergent commands used for debugging, and compiling and sticks them into a simple menu next to commands used for maintaining a project file.

What EDE brings to the party is an awareness of how a singular source file fits into the overall scheme of an application. EDE knows what target a file belongs to, and will offer the correct options automatically when debugging or compiling.

EDE is an object oriented program which defines a set of core virtual objects representing a project and target. Actual implementations expound upon these providing the actual functionality.

Teaching EDE to wrap your project provides an Emacs API for other tools to use to find source code in your project.

EDE supports multiple project styles. Project stiles that come with EDE by default include:

Makefile/Automake project

Create projects using the EDE interface, and autogenerate a Makefile, or an Automake infrastructure to compile your project.

Hand Written Automake

The project-am module will read pre-existing automake files, and has some handy conveiniences to edit that file for you.

C++ Root project

Create these in your .emacs file to provide API support to Semantic header file finder and project scanning.

Simple

The simple project style you can use to build your own simple EDE projects.

Check it out here