Random Musings About Software

After trying out several editors and IDE's for software development I've decided to settle on using Eclipse for 95% of the work I do and I'll use Xcode only when forced to.

This quick blog post will assist you in getting Eclipse configured for developing anything to do with Drupal.

There are a few versions of Eclipse but the one I've found that works best for Drupal Development is the version put out by the PDT Project. The PDT project is working towards providing a PHP Development Tools framework for the Eclipse platform. This project will encompass all development components necessary to develop PHP and will facilitate extensibility.

After you have it installed, go to Windows -> Preferences and make the following changes:

1. Content Types
   1. Expand the left-hand menu to General -> Content Types
   2. Under "Content types" on the right, click Text -> PHP Source File
   3. Add the *.info, *.engine, *.theme, *.install, *.inc, and *.module file types
2. Tab formatting for PHP
   1. Expand the left-hand menu to PHP -> Formatter
   2. Check the "Indent using spaces" radio button.
   3. Change the indent size to 2.
3. Tab formatting for CSS
   1. Expand the left-hand menu to Web and XML -> CSS Files -> CSS Source
   2. Select 'Indent using spaces'
   3. Set 'Intentation size' to 2
4. Tab formatting for JavaScript
   1. Expand the left-hand menu to Web and XML -> Javascript Files -> Javascript Source
   2. Select 'Indent using spaces'
   3. Set 'Intentation size' to 2
5. Tab formatting for HTML
   1. Expand the left-hand menu to Web and XML -> HTML Files -> HTML Source
   2. Select 'Indent using spaces'
   3. Set 'Intentation size' to 2
6. Tab formatting for XML
   1. Expand the left-hand menu to Web and XML -> XML Files -> XML Source
   2. Select 'Indent using spaces'
   3. Set 'Intentation size' to 2
7. Make it Unix-friendly
   1. Expand the left-hand menu to General ->Workspace
   2. Text File encoding should be UTF-8
   3. New text file line delimeter should be Unix
8. Set default text mode to -kkv
   1. Expand the left-hand menu to Team -> CVS
   2. Click on the Files and Folders tab
   3. set the "Default text mode" dropdown to "ASCII with keyword expansion (-kkv)"
9. Tabulators
   1. Expand the left-hand menu to PHP -> Editor -> Typing
   2. Check the "Tab key indents the current line" under Tabulators

   You should now have Eclipse properly configured for Drupal development work.

I used to use the Kinkless kGTD tool developed by Ethan Schoonover. It was a great tool and since it was integrated with Omni Outliner it was a perfect fit for me as a Omni Outliner user.

When Ethan announced that he was no longer going to continue working on kGTD I was a bit bummed until I heard that kGTD was getting rolled into a new product from OmniGroup called OmniFocus. I was once more excited.

Unfortunately it has been approximately 8 months and 3 weeks since the announcement of OmniFocus and other than a few movies, a few screenshots, and a demo at the Apple Store during WWDC we still don't even have a public alpha only a closed, limited beta. At this rate we might see Internet Explorer 7 for OS X before we'll see OmniFocus.

As I can't continue to use the kGTD tools anymore (no updates etc) and since OmniFocus appears to be a very distant horizon I'm making the move to iGTD.