There is one thing that has been important to me for a long time in Builder, but I’ve been unable to solve the problem correctly until recently. And that is command line tools.
I’m not naive enough to believe that I can convince every multi-decade Emacs and Vim user to switch to a Gtk-based application. Even if our emulation of such systems are perfect, the muscle-memory of launching them from the command line is entrenched in work-flows. Because of that, I wanted to export many of our tools via command line tools.
In git, Builder now has support for an ide command line tool. The goal is for plugins to export their features via a command line tool. The added benefit is that it can provide an easier way to test core functionality of your plugin.
These aren’t all finished, but this gives you an idea of where we are going.
# list available commands
ide --list-commands
# -d allows selecting target device
ide build -j 12 -d local
# clone/bootstrap/build, prepares for contribution
ide contribute gtk+
# create a shared library project
ide create-project foo-glib --template=library --with-tests
You get the idea. None of those work as advertised, but you know it goes, that’s the plan.