At the moment I'm evaluating the Keil5 ide. In Coocox the compiler will gray out the unused preprocessor code, is very handy. Can't find this option in Keil uvision 5, how do you guys do that? How can you read (and understand) the code if you don't know what's used or not.
Example: my.st.com/.../gray.PNG
It's not too often I have had to suffer libraries where the huge amount of #ifdef blocks makes it impossible to read the code. Most of the time, I have just been able to classify the code as "code from hell" and go for some other library.
I don't think color-coding would give much improvement. In my view, a much better route would be to use code-folding based on enabled defines.
The problem with just going for color-coding, is that I still get a significant amount of the screen estate showing code lines that aren't relevant, or part of the build.
From a personal perspective, I rarely use the editor of uVision. It would be too strong to say that I dislike the uVision one. Rather, I prefer to use a dedicated editor; one that I use for ALL editing tasks.
The IDE is far more than just being just an editor. As a development environment, it is extremely powerful and uses a superb compiler package under the hood.
From some previous threads we have seen on the subject, I think lots of people think the Keil tools can't be used if the user doesn't like the editor.
I normally have a favorite editor that I use both for Windows and Linux projects, and with multiple programming languages and multiple different compiler tool chains. It's just practical to keep down on the number of editors in use.
The editor in uV will auto-detect if files has changed so there are no problems having the same files open in more than one editor.