New and improved ebe

Recently I decided to bite the bullet and rewrite the ebe integrated development environment using Qt.  I was getting quite tired of coping with the large number of windows used in the original ebe.  I also needed to update ebe so that class and structs could be properly displayed while debugging.  It was a fairly interesting adventure.

You can see how it looks using Qt.  The various windows are now implemented using a main widget for the editing and a collection of dock widgets.  The dock widgets can be moved around and resized.  They can even be moved out of the main window if desired.  Perhaps more useful is the ability to drop dock widgets on top of each other forming a collection of tabs.  In the image above the terminal, project and back trace dock widgets are stacked making it simple to select one of the 3 to display.

The data window is now a dock widget containing a "tree" widget which has little "arrows" to the left of items which can be expanded.  You can expand class objects and arrays to drill down into the data of a program.  The tree widget turned out to be exactly what was needed to display the data.  This simplified the effort involved in revising the data display.

The terminal was previously an xterm window under Linux and a cmd.exe window under Windows.  These separate windows complicated the management of fonts.  Now you can increase or decrease the fonts in all the widgets using Control+ or Control-.

Qt had some extra capabilities which I had not expected.  There is a QCompleter class designed to aid in implementing word completion for a variety of widgets.  I used this to make editing easier.  There is a QSyntaxHighlighter class designed for implementing syntax.  I also used Qt's QTabWidget to manage editing a collection of files as tabs in the source frame.  It allows you to open all the files in a project when you start ebe.

Overall I found it easier to implement this version of ebe compared to the previous version based on Python.  It requires more effort to get started coding with Qt, but the rather large class collection ends up saving time.  It was also nice for me to use C++ which I have more experience with.

I think the program would look better with a collection of toolbars with colorful icons.  I can't think of appropriate icons for use in debugging, but I will probably add a toolbar of file/edit operations so it doesn't look so boring.