Charles Choi is back with another app in his causal suite. This time it’s about making it easier to work with the Make utility. For reasons that I don’t understand, lots of people hate make and complain, in particular, about the significance of tabs in a make script. I love Make and have used it happily for years.
To be sure, it can be a bit fiddly to set up a script—especially in Make’s modern incarnations—but once that’s done, building the program (or whatever) is easy. You simply type make and go out for a coffee. My impression is that make is not used—at least directly—as much anymore. That’s probably because IDEs do a lot of the things that we used to depend on Make for.
Regardless, Choi’s latest offering helps with the hard part: writing and understanding Make scripts. I haven’t installed it yet and it’s a bit hard to figure out how it works from Choi’s announcement but it seems like a really useful addition to our toolkits. One of the worst things about Make scripts are the macros. As Choi says, it’s impossible to remember what they do so Casual Make has a special facility for discovering their meaning. You can get an idea of some of the other functions by looking at the menu in Choi’s announcement.
Like everyone else, I seem to use Make less often these days so I’m glad to have this app to help me remember the details. It’s much easier than reading through the manual.