The EPICS IDE is an Eclipse plug-in that is intended to help with EPICS development. It is designed to be used with the C/C++ Development Tools (CDT). EPICS projects have their own nature as well as C/C++ natures and thus have all of the properties of a C/C++ project, as well as additional ones appropriate to EPICS.
The C/C++ Development Tools provide a way to build projects using Make. This is most of what is necessary to build EPICS, as it has its own extensive build system that works on all of the common platforms (Solaris, Linux, Mac OSX, HPUX, and Windows). Eclipse, in general, and CDT, in particular, provide a useful and convenient way to manage EPICS projects, including EPICS Base, EPICS Extensions, and EPICS IOC development. Eclipse also provides an excellent interface to CVS, which is used extensively by EPICS. This guide gives some indications of how this may be done and also provides tutorials to help you get started.
Much of development described can be done using only CDT, which needs to be installed in Eclipse, and the Team plug-in for CVS that comes preinstalled. In addition to these tools, the EPICS IDE plug-in provides New project and New Application wizards and additional support to help with EPICS development, particularly in developing and managing IOCs.
This guide includes the following general topics: