The CEDET Project management system provides a few simple keystrokes for organizing your files, building Makefiles or Automake files, and compiling your sources.

If you don't want CEDET to manage your Makefiles, CEDET will still be able to identify some types of projects based on pre-existing build configurations, such as the Emacs sources, the Linux kernel, or any project built using Automake.

The entire CEDET Makefile tree was built with CEDET's project management system, so when you download and build the distribution package, you will be using a CEDET project.

The image to the right shows a part of the Project management menu.

Project Basics

The project system for CEDET is implemented in a tool called EDE, or "Emacs Development Environment". The EDE tool was started in 1997 and is the backbone of many CEDET features. This section will refer to EDE.

The key reason to enable global-ede-mode with your CEDET install is to enable the other tools in the CEDET suite to identify the boundaries of your project. In particular, the smart completion system and the Symref system must be able to find all your sourcecode in order to provide the desired results.

Use EDE to create makefiles

If you would like to use EDE to do all the build management of your sourcecode, and your project is built from C/C++ code, Emacs Lisp code, and texinfo documentation, then you are in luck. Start with the command:

M-x ede-new RET

and choose either a Makefile or Automake based project. You can then use

M-x ede-new-target RET

to create makefile targets and start adding source files into your project. Use the project menu to create your makefiles, and build your sources.

Use EDE to wrap a known project type

If you are working on the code to Emacs, Linux, or have a project using hand-written Automake files, then you are in luck. All you need to do is enable EDE's global mode, and that's it.

EDE will autodetect these project types, and configure itself to help you use the other features that need the EDE structure.

Use EDE to wrap a project with a custom build script

If you are working with a custom build system, or a system not yet supported by default by EDE, then you will need to wrap your project in a simple EDE wrapper.

For C or C++ projects, there is a custom project you can use called ede-cpp-root. You can configure this project in your .emacs file.

A simple example looks like this:

 (ede-cpp-root-project "NAME" :file "FILENAME"
     :include-path '( "/include" "../include" "/c/include" )
     :system-include-path '( "/usr/include/c++/3.2.2/" )
     :spp-table '( ("MOOSE" . "")
                   ("CONST" . "const") )
     :spp-files '( "include/config.h" )
     ) 

EDE likes to anchor its projects to files on the filesystem, so be sure to set FILENAME to a real file in your project, such as a Makefile. The remaining slots are optional, but allow to to specify project specific include paths, or pre-processor tables. In this case "spp" stands for the "Semantic PreProcessor", the tool used to parse C PreProcessor statements.