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This chapter describes how you can set your individual preferences about how KDevelop works. All settings addressed below can be found by the according entry in the Options-menu.
As KDevelop supports the use of third-party programs within it's user interface, you are able to configure any program that suits your needs towards application development. This can be done by adding programs to the already pre-defined ones in the "Tools"-menu. To change the tools-menu, select "Tools" from the "Options" menu. This dialog allows to specify the entry name, program and additional command line options you want to pass to the execution. To remove a program from the menu, select the entry name and choose "Delete". To add a program, specify the menuentry, where a & is used as a menu-accelerator; you may compare the already configured entries with the entry list. Select the binary and pass your commandline options (use %S to get the name of the current open file and %D for the project directory). Select whether to capture the output of the Tool (displayed in the "messages" and "stderr" panes). Then hit "Add" and the entry is added to the list. After leaving the configuration dialog, the tools-menu updates itself, so the new configuration is already usable without restarting KDevelop.
The Logical File Viewer can be configured by context menus completely. As it's intention is to separate files logically to keep a better overview over complex projects, one of the most used configurations is to create file groups. Those can be set by opening the context menu with a right mouse button click over the project icon displayed at the root of the tree. The menu offers:
Over a group folder, the according context menu offers:
Make-command: The General Options dialog lets you configure KDevelop's general settings. First, you should set the make-command available on your system. If the selected program does not exist, KDevelop will warn you the next time you're invoking a make command.
Autosave:
If Autosave is checked, KDevelop will save all changed files periodically. The autosaving time range can be set to 3, 5, 15 or 30 minutes.
Autoswitch:
If Autoswitch is enabled, the KDevelop windows will switch on and off according to the usage context, e.g. if you switch to a documentation in the Help-menu, the Documentation browser will be opened, together with the documentation tree and the output window turned off.
Startup:
For starting KDevelop, you have the option to enable/disable the start-logo to be shown during the time KDevelop loads. Further, if you don't like the last project to be opened on startup, you can disable the default behavior.
The Configure Keys dialog lets you configure the KDevelop key bindings. Note that global keys can be configured in the KDE Control Center, such as open file and print. A key function can be configured by choosing the menu entry. Then the configuration can be changed by checking values like the Alt / Ctrl key etc.
For setting up the documentation browser to work correctly, KDevelop needs some information about where the HTML-documentation is placed on the system. Therefore, the Documentation Path properties dialog needs the path of the Qt- online documentation in HTML as well as the path to the KDE-Library documentation.
Usually, the Qt-Documentation is placed in the same directory where Qt is installed; e.g. if Qt resides in /usr/local/qt, the path you have to enter is /usr/local/qt/html. For the KDE- Documentation, you have to set the directory to the root of the documentation, assumed all KDE-Libs documentation resides in the same directory. Both path's can be selected by pressing the according buttons, displaying a path-selection. If your system doesn't contain the documentation for the KDE-libs, you should first enter the next configuration dialog, Update KDE-Documentation. This will create the documentation to a path of your choice, also setting the KDE Library Doc path automatically.
For those users who don't have a recent documentation of the KDE-libraries, especially the documentation for the files installed on the system, the Update KDE-Documentation dialog creates a new one or updates existing documentations. This function requires your system to have KDoc and qt2kdoc installed, included in the KDE-SDK package. First of, you have to set up the path to your recent kdelibs sources, which is not the include-path for KDE ! Just enter the path to the sources, like: /home/rnolden/kdelibs-1.1/.
Then, you can choose three different installation modes, as:
The "new KDE Libs Documentation path" is to be set for option 2 and 3 of the installation mode. This is also recommended for users who generate a new documentation from scratch.
After pressing the OK button, KDevelop will create a subdirectory "KDoc-reference" in the documentation path containing the KDoc
reference files. First, the qt library documentation classes will be indexed to connect the Qt documentation with the
documentation to be generated for the kdelibs. So it is important that you have set up the Qt documentation path first to ensure
that it can be found by qt2kdoc. Finally, the KDE libs will be indexed and the documentation will be build with
cross-references to give browsing the most functionality.
kdoc.rules file in the kdebase package resp. the koffice package, which is located in kdebase in the root directory of the
sources, in KOffice in koffice/lib. Select option 3 (Leave old Documentation untouched) and leave the output path below that option as
it is. This will keep the kdelibs documentation and generate the kdebase-libraries (resp. the koffice-libraries) documentation to the
same location with cross-references to the kdelibs documentation additionally. After generating the documentation the libraries are
available in the documentation tree automatically. For further KDE packages coming with additional libraries you should look for the
kdoc.rules file to generate additional documentation as with the KDE-Base and KOffice packages.
The Create Search Database dialog, accessed via the create-button, allows the programmer to create a database to search for a keyword interactively. To create and use the documentation search function, you must have the program glimpse 4.0 or ht://Dig installed. Preset are the options to index the given KDE-Library documentation as well as the Qt-Documentation, assuming the path to the documentation files were set in the "Documentation Path" dialog of the options- menu. Additionally, the index can include directories the user can set up himself by the "additional directories to index"-field. After setting a path to an additional directory, the "Add" - button must be pushed to set the path. A path once set can be removed from the index by selecting the path in the path field and pushing "Remove". Furthermore, the user is offered three different modes for the index size: tiny, small and medium. The higher the index size, the more the index files will grow. On the other hand, a search in a bigger search-database will be faster and more successful, so we suggest choosing a "medium" size. For using the search function, see section Using the Documentation Browser.
This option allows you to create a cross-reference file for your project when generating the API documentation with KDoc. The cross-reference file will be placed in the references directory and make your project available in the documentation tree. If you donīt have write access to the directory containing the reference files you have to uncheck this option to generate the API documentation without errors.
The default setup for KDevelop is to use the internal debugger. Click on "Use external debugger" if you wish to use a different debugger and enter the name of the debugger to use. See your debuggers documentation on how to run it. Selecting the internal debugger enables an additional set of options you can choose from:
On the paths tab you can enter the paths to your Qt 2.x and KDE 2 installations as well as where to create new projects. To learn more about installing Qt 2.x / KDE 2 and configuring KDevelop for Qt 2.x and KDE 2 read the KDE Application Tutorials.
The default location for KDevelop to create new projects is in the user's home directory. If you want to change this behaviour you can enter the desired location into the default project path field.
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