The Texas Instruments community does not have a modern, well-working IDE for development. A while ago, I thought I’d take up the responsibility and create tiDE - Texas Instruments Development Environment. It’s an open source IDE which, although geared heavily towards TI development, should be easy to adapt to many more languages if you so choose. I just want to highlight some interesting things about it.
First of all, it has support for a plethora of languages (or at least it will - languages already supported are highlighted): z80 Assembly, z80 TI-Basic, z80 Axe Parser, 68k Assembly, 68k TI-Basic, 68k C, ARM Basic, ARM Assembly, ARM C, and TI-Lua.
tiDE also comes with it’s own z80 TI-83+ emulator, and will eventually have built-in emulators for all the platforms it supports.
Interesting features that the IDE has, that may be extensible to your own programs, that are completed and ready for use as of now:
- Syntax Highlighting, Code Completion, and Code Folding provided by ICSharpCode’s open-source Text Editor
- Window Docking provided by the open-source Dock Panel Suite
- XML-Based Project and File Templates
- Code Insight - Provides the ability to learn different things about code, including generating a list of “important places” that the solution explorer uses to navigate straight to different areas of code
- Extensible, easy to implement Settings Manager
- z80 Core Emulation provided by Benjamin Ryves in a project called “Brazil”
- Fast mnomic-based assembly using caching to improve speed
- Automatic Substitution - one of our supported languages, TI-Basic, has untypable characters. When you type “->”, it automatically becomes “→”
- (De)tokenization: taking a series of text and tokenizing it into smaller, byte based commands
- Grayscale sprite editing with any number of colors
- Automatic generation and presentation of commands provided through code completion
- Customizable keyboard shortcuts that map to any clickable object in the IDE
All of these features are ready to use right now, and free for anyone to implement in their own projects. Download the source code at http://tidenv.codeplex.com