Ubuntu Manpage: fp - Free Pascal Compiler (FPC) integrated development environment

NAME

       fp - Free Pascal Compiler (FPC) integrated development environment

SYNOPSIS

       fp [options] [sourcefile]

DESCRIPTION

       This  binary  is  the  integrated  development  environment of the Free Pascal 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 targets (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       updated constantly, while this man page can be out of date.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 .tphfilesasdocumentation.

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
systems 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 differences.

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 combinations 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 perhaps 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)