Not everything in Linux comes for free. CodeFusion is one of the things that are not. It costs Rs 15,000, but is definitely worth it.

One of the major complaints about Linux has been that there aren’t any good development environments for it. You’ve to encode using conventional tools and compilers, and there are no visual tools available. But if CodeFusion is an indicator of things to come, that complaint will soon go the same way as the earlier ones.

CodeFusion is an IDE or Integrated Development Environment. As with other IDEs, it combines the different aspects of development like editing, compiling, linking, building projects, debugging, source or symbol browsing, class hierarchical browsing, pattern searching or replacing, version control, etc, into one unified environment. CodeFusion takes popular coding tools and provides a visual skin for them, to provide a comfortable and modern development environment under X.

Installing CodeFusion is simple. A program called install-gui does the installation, almost in the same way as most Windows programs are installed. As with most IDEs, you need to set up some environment variables (like path, libraries, etc). The complete install takes about 250 MB of space. This includes compilers, IDE, debugger, and the documentation in HTML format.

The CodeFusion IDE comes with a GNU public license, which states that you can use, modify, and distribute it. But on careful reading, I found that a few components, specifically Source-Navigator, is a commercial product. That explained the CD key provided.

The package is mostly about Source-Navigator and the visual debugger—Cygnus Insight. Insight is again a graphical skin for the GNU debugger—GDB, known in programming circles as GDBtk.

There’s a nice tutorial section in the manual, which explains the modus operandi. Source-Navigator works on the basis of projects. You can start with a new project or continue with any of your previous ones.

For a new project, it’ll ask for the directories that are to be added. In large projects, this can take a bit of time, as the program scans all files to create the file-symbol table.

Once you’ve the project files in place, you’ve to decide which are the target files that are needed in a particular build. Build setting also lets you select the actual compiler/linker that’ll be used for the build.

One interesting point is that you can set rules as part of these settings. For example, you can specify external programs and macros to facilitate and extend the development environment. This is a major advantage for developers, who need to do pre-process tasks before a build.

The Editor shows the hierarchy, class, and includes browsers, and a cross-referencer. The latter helps in understanding complex source code by showing refers-to and referred-by relationships.

Source-Navigator lets you compile the same project to multiple build targets. So, you can have different versions with different settings, without having to maintain separate project files. The Source-Navigator can use an external MakeFile for the build process. It can be part of the build settings as well.