Alternative (better!) IDE to MPLAB-X

[jc101]

Yea I did that in the past but I thought it was a netbeans file I was editing, maybe this is why it did not work as Microchip made it use another file. I'll try it. Hopefully the menu's scale up or it works with windows scaling.

It works for 5.50, as I did this only last week.  Installed 5.50, edited the file, and it went from looking like Minecraft to usable.

[Rudolph Riedel]

Isn't atsam cortex m based? I'd use Vs code with cortex m debug for that!

I would like to switch to using PlatformIO but the Atmel SAM platform does not support going CMSIS / BareMetal.
It "only" supports Arduino, MBed, Simba and Zephyr - no option for me.

Sure, using VScode as editor and compiling from the shell works but editing and compiling is by far not why I am still using Microchip Studio, one thing I would be missing would be the GUI for programming the chips including the "fuse" settings.
Which brings me back to why testing out MPLAB-X was a major pain for me so far, it claims to be working for ATSAM but I disagree.

[Simon]

Atmel studio now microchip studio is VS and supports ATSAM as Atmel's original IDE.

[JOEBOBSICLE]

Isn't atsam cortex m based? I'd use Vs code with cortex m debug for that!

Are you saying that if it is a cortex m processor you can use Visual Studio?

And what about in circuit debugging? Which in-circuit debugger would you use which is fully supported by Visual Studio?

Thank you

Cortex debug is the name of an extension that launches openocd and then gdb. It can do any cortex m chip.

There's a lot of IDEs now, you can even use visual studio by using visual gdb extension

[NiHaoMike]

MPLAB X looks just fine on a 50" 4K for me. Granted, I normally have it only take up half the screen leaving the other half for referencing datasheets and stuff, but I did try maximizing it and it seems to work well with the split view to make it easier to reference different parts of a large source file at once.

[Simon]

To make MPLAB-X better on my 27" 4K screens I end up doing the following after each version is installed.

Edit the mplab_ide.conf file ( C:\Program Files (x86)\Microchip\MPLABX\v5.xx\mplab_platform\etc ) and adding this as the first option

Code: [Select]

-J-Dsun.java2d.dpiaware=trueinto the line

Code: [Select]

default_optionsThis seems to remove the pixelation for me.  I do then have to play with altering the code text size in the config options, but I keep a canned set of those to ensure formatting consistency between the various machines I use.

Note to do this you will need to run Notepad as administrator to be able to save it on a Windows 10 box.

This works, strange that line is not already in the options. changing the resident allow hi dpi setting from false to true did nothing. Amazing no one has bothered to fix this. Does this mean that at each update I will have to redo it?

[jc101]

This works, strange that line is not already in the options. changing the resident allow hi dpi setting from false to true did nothing. Amazing no one has bothered to fix this. Does this mean that at each update I will have to redo it?

Sadly, yes.  I've reported it before, never been fixed.

[newbrain]

Are you saying that if it is a cortex m processor you can use Visual Studio?

You know what?
You can, and it's not even rocket surgery.
Though the post you are referring to mentioned Visual Studio Code, a very different animal, I have compiled and debugged cortex-m code under Visual Studio.

Just for kicks, I opened one of my Cmake/ninja/clang based project and with minimum fuss (some configuration editing in a VS json config file) it built from inside with no issue (with all the usual Visual Studio intellisense, error parsing, code jumps etc.).

For debug, I set it to use pyocd as a gdb server (the board has a CMSIS DAP debug adapter) and it worked as expected, just another .json file for configuration.
I did not setup flashing, but that's also possible, I'm sure.

Note that I often refer to the (paid) VisualGDB extension - this is not it, in this case I disabled it on purpose, just to make sure I was only using Visual Studio stuff.

[Simon]

Although the icons are all small and I tried everything but what I care more about is seeing the code I write as words rather than disassembled letters

[AaronLee]

Are you saying that if it is a cortex m processor you can use Visual Studio?

You know what?
You can, and it's not even rocket surgery.
Though the post you are referring to mentioned Visual Studio Code, a very different animal, I have compiled and debugged cortex-m code under Visual Studio.

Just for kicks, I opened one of my Cmake/ninja/clang based project and with minimum fuss (some configuration editing in a VS json config file) it built from inside with no issue (with all the usual Visual Studio intellisense, error parsing, code jumps etc.).

For debug, I set it to use pyocd as a gdb server (the board has a CMSIS DAP debug adapter) and it worked as expected, just another .json file for configuration.
I did not setup flashing, but that's also possible, I'm sure.

Note that I often refer to the (paid) VisualGDB extension - this is not it, in this case I disabled it on purpose, just to make sure I was only using Visual Studio stuff.

Do you happen to have a link to a website that explains any of this in detail? I'd be quite interested to try it out.

[newbrain]

Do you happen to have a link to a website that explains any of this in detail? I'd be quite interested to try it out.

Not in great detail, but the bases are here:

Cmake in VS:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/cmake-projects-in-visual-studio?view=msvc-160

Debugger set up:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/launch-vs-schema-reference-cpp?view=msvc-160

And a more step by step guide:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/debugging-an-embedded-arm-device-in-visual-studio/