fp(1) Free Pascal IDE fp(1)NAMEfp - Free Pascal Compiler (FPC) integrated development environment
SYNOPSISfp [options] [sourcefile]
DESCRIPTION
This binary is the integrated development environment of the Free Pas‐
cal Compiler (FPC) which is an advanced Turbo Pascal and Delphi (7.0)
compatible multitarget Pascal compiler. The compiler engine is not
based on GCC, but is completely standalone.
The compiler uses LD(1) and can use AS(1) (see parameter -Aas), but
also has its own binary object writer.
The current main targets are Go32V2 (Dos DJGPP extender), Freebsd,
Linux, MacOS, MacOSX, MorphOS, Netware, OS/2 and Win32. The other tar‐
gets (M68K compilers for Atari and Amiga) are either based on older
versions of the compiler or are still in development.
This manpage is meant for quick-reference only. FPC comes with a great
(2000+ pages) manual, which is updated constantly, while this man page
can be out of date.
Usage
The user interface of the IDE has been designed to be similar to Turbo
Pascal. It provides the user with a user friendly, but rather powerful
editor, an extensive on-line help system and a debugger.
A text mode windowing system is the base of the user interface. The
mouse is supported, but most people will use the keyboard. The user
will usually open a few text editor windows in which he will design his
program, during which he can regularily check and debug through the use
of hot keys. The high speed of the compiler ensures that programmers
can do this often and therefore allows speedy development of code.
Help files
No help files are provided by default. The user must download the Free
Pascal documentation in HTML format and install it into the IDE using
the Help->Files menu. Turbo Pascal .tph files can also be installed in
this menu and can be useful for source code that ships with .tphfile‐
sasdocumentation.
Character sets
The IDE has been designed for VGA text mode fonts. These fonts allow
visually more interresting text modes than the the VT100 fonts normally
used on Unix systems and also more portable, since most operating sys‐
tems use VGA character sets for their text modes.
When running on a VT100 compatible terminal, some emulation will occur.
Internally the IDE will think it is running on a VGA text mode font
(most likely code page 850), while all characters will (in the case of
code page 850) be converted to Latin-1 and VT100 alternate character
set characters.
The Linux console can do VGA fonts and therefore the IDE can be viewed
as it was intended on it. The Linux console mode supports the all of
the VGA character set through the /dev/vcsa* devices and most of it
through normal escape sequences. To prevent bad user experiences, the
IDE has been made rather aggressive in using VGA character sets. First
it will determine the actual console number you are running on (even if
you run on a pty, like in Midnight Commander). Then the IDE will open
the /dev/vcsa* device belonging to that console. If permission is
denied the IDE will call the grab_vcsa utility, which is a setuid root
utility which will grant permissions to the vcsa device.
In case the vcsa device is not available, the IDE will send escape
codes to enable the VGA font. In this mode a few characters in the low
32 ascii positions are unavailable, but mainly since the full set of
line drawing characters is available the user will notice few differ‐
ences.
The Linux frame buffer device and the Free Pascal IDE are an excellent
combination. With fbdev it is possible to use text mode resolutions
higher than the normal 80x25, which allows the programmer to see a lot
more code at a time.
The Linux console allows the user to load user defined fonts. If you do
this, such a font must have a VGA styled layout, i.e. code page
437/850/... (Note that this does not mean your file system has to use
such an encoding, the Linux console handles the conversion from
ISO-8859-1, UTF-8 or whatever to the font.) Since the default fonts
have a code page 437 layout, only users that have experimented with
fonts will have to take care here.
The IDE recognizes the environment variable CONSOLEFONT_CP in which you
can specify the code page of the console font. Recognized values are
currently "cp437" and "cp850". If you do not set this variable code
page 437 will be assumed. Currently, if you use code page 850 without
setting the variable there won't be a huge impact at this time, the
characters that the IDE uses exist in both code pages.
Note: KOI8-R/KOI8-U fonts have all required characters, but the line
drawing characters are not in the right positions. We may support this
in the future, but currently do not.
Keyboard
Unix keyboard handling is a complicated matter because not all key com‐
binations generate escape codes, different terminal emulators generate
different escape codes, and some key combinations may trigger actions
in the X11 Window manager.
Because the Free Pascal IDE's user interface is designed to be similar
to Turbo Pascal, including keyboard commands, you may experience one of
the above situations. Some alternative keys have been added, and per‐
haps more will have to be added in the future.
When running on the Linux console, the keyboard is reprogrammed for
full functionality.
Here are some common problems you may encounter and possible work-
arounds:
Problem: Selecting text with shift+arrow keys does not work.
Solution: Use the mouse
Solution: Use "ctrl+k b" to mark start of block,"ctrl+k e" to mark end
of block, "ctrl+k h" to hide the block.
Problem: Cut/Copy/Paste keys do not work.
Solution: Go to Options->Environment->Keyboard & mouse and enable the
Microsoft styled Cut/Copy/Paste keys.
Solution: Use the menu bar.
Problem: Alt key does not work.
Solution: Press Escape first, then the key without alt. Note that this
is not possible on the Linux console, but the Alt key does work there.
If for whatever reason the reprogrammed Linux console keyboard is not
restored to the original state after exit (IDE crash?), you can do
something like "/etc/init.d/kbd start" to reprogram it into its normal
behaviour.
AUTHORS
Free Pascal development team (see http://www.freepascal.org)
SEE ALSO
grab_vcsa fpc fpc.cfg(5)ppdep(1)ppudump(1)ppumove(1)ptop(1)h2pas(1)ld(1)as(1)Free Pascal 14 apr 2006 fp(1)
