Sublime with Catkin
12 Jul 2016Introduction
This post is about the usage of sublime with the catkin infrastructure used by ROS. This was tested with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and ROS Indigo. The post assumes that you are familiar with both ROS and catkin and that you have a catkin workspace working with the usual folder structure in ~/catkin_ws. Another nice introduction into using sublime as your IDE can be found at Linux Sublime Dev, this post aims to provide a simple overview and setup for catkin specifically.
Sublime Installation
For those of you who have never heard of sublime, here a quick and dirty installation guide to have the setup that I am working with. First install sublime 3:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/sublime-text-3
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sublime-text-installer
Everything gets installed for you, such that you can open sublime with a simple subl command in the terminal. For all real cool features of the program you need to install the so called package_control.
Some useful starting points:
- For some of the common commands, consult the cheatsheet
- In general, to edit your preferences (such as tabbing), simply open
Preferences -> Settings - Userand overwrite settings you find inPreferences -> Settings - Default - If you are not satisfied with the syntax detected by sublime you can simply change it with
View -> Syntax -> Open all with current extension as... ->[your syntax choice]
Some other neat extensions:
Some of the useful key-bindings to show the power of sublime:
| TEXT EDITING | |
|---|---|
ctrl + d |
multi-select occurrences of pattern |
ctrl + click |
multi-cursor selection |
| WINDOW NAVIGATION | |
|---|---|
shift + alt + num |
number of split windows in editor |
ctrl + page up/down |
to alter between file tabs |
| FILE NAVIGATION | |
|---|---|
ctrl + p |
search box to look for files inside the opened folder |
ctrl + o |
to use the OS navigation to open another file in sublime |
alt + o |
to switch between source and header files |
ctrl + shift + f |
find all occurrences within a certain folder |
Set up the catkin project
Create project files
Open sublime and then simply add your catkin_ws/src folder by using Project -> Add Folder to Project, then save it as a project file in a location of your choice by Project -> Save Project as....
Now when you open sublime, by default you should have your catkin workspace in the file navigator.
Build tags to jump to definitions
As a next step, you want to use CTags to jump through definitions in your source code. The source of the CTags Plugin is found here. You can simply install it by using the package manager. As a refresher: Type Alt + Shift + P and type install. Type ctags and put enter. For ctags to work properly, ctags also has to be installed on the OS via sudo apt-get install exuberant-ctags.
To build the indices just right click on your project folder and click CTags: Rebuild Tags in the context menu. In the context menu, a bottom Navigate to Definition should now have appeared.
Build catkin packages from sublime
It is very straightforward to build catkin packages using catkin tools within sublime. Simply install the catkin builder using the package manager. You can then either run it with ctrl + shift + p and then Build with: Catkin or using Tools -> Build.
Note: If you have your sources symbolically linked into your workspace this package won’t work, I should make an issue about this at some point.
ROS Msg File Syntax
Download the syntax file from Github and copy the file into ~.config/sublime-text-3/Packages/User. Now you can simply select ROS message definition with View -> Syntax -> Open all with current extension as....