{"id":12846,"date":"2025-03-14T11:10:34","date_gmt":"2025-03-14T15:10:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=12846"},"modified":"2025-03-20T15:29:52","modified_gmt":"2025-03-20T19:29:52","slug":"casual-make","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=12846","title":{"rendered":"Casual Make"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nCharles Choi is back with another app in his causal suite. This time it&rsquo;s about <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/emacs\/comments\/1jah11x\/announcing_casual_make\/\">making it easier to work with the Make utility<\/a>. For reasons that I don&rsquo;t understand, lots of people hate make and complain, in particular, about the significance of <code>tabs<\/code> in a make script. I love Make and have used it happily for years.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nTo be sure, it can be a bit fiddly to set up a script\u2014especially in Make&rsquo;s modern incarnations\u2014but once that&rsquo;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\u2014at least directly\u2014as much anymore. That&rsquo;s probably because IDEs do a lot of the things that we used to depend on Make for.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nRegardless, Choi&rsquo;s latest offering helps with the hard part: writing and understanding Make scripts. I haven&rsquo;t installed it yet and it&rsquo;s a bit hard to figure out how it works from Choi&rsquo;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&rsquo;s impossible to remember what they do so <i>Casual Make<\/i> 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&rsquo;s announcement.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nLike everyone else, I seem to use Make less often these days so I&rsquo;m glad to have this app to help me remember the details. It&rsquo;s much easier than reading through the manual.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<b>Update<\/b> <span class=\"timestamp-wrapper\"><span class=\"timestamp\">[2025-03-20 Thu 15:27]<\/span><\/span>: Added link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Charles Choi is back with another app in his causal suite. This time it&rsquo;s about making it easier to work with the Make utility. For reasons that I don&rsquo;t understand, lots of people hate make and complain, in particular, about &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=12846\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-12846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-emacs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12846"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12861,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12846\/revisions\/12861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}