I love Android but I really hate Eclipse, and the whole IDE paradigm in general. I prefer to do development using Vim, screen, and a few shells running whatever commands are relevant for the project I'm working on. However, the Android project make it pretty clear that they support Eclipse+ADT first and foremost, so I gave it a try, if only to see what magical features I would need to figure out how to replace. Thankfully, doing so is pretty easy. Here's what you need to do to develop for Android with just a shell and your favorite text editor.
Ant is the build tool you'll use to build and deploy your
project while developing, and to make a release when ready. But you can't
run Ant in a project created in Eclipse with ADT, because ADT
doesn't give you the necessary build files. But they're easy to populate,
using android update project.
Before running android update project, you need to find out the
ID of the target you want to use for your project. Run android list
targets and find the ID for your target. Now run android
update project --target your-target-id --name your-project-name --path
/path/to/your/project. It will populate your project with
build.xml and local.properties. It'll also say that
it's updating default.properties, but it left it unchanged for
me.
Bonus tip: If you want to avoid Eclipse completely and start your project
from scratch on the command line, you can simply run android create
project with the --target, --name,
--path, --activity, and --package
options populated appropriately. This is the more direct route, instead of
starting a project in Eclipse and then later running android update
project like I did.
This part is simple. See ant help for more details.
ant compile will compile your code and re-generate
R.java.ant debug will do the above, plus build and sign a package
(apk) file.ant install will do all of the above plus install it to
the emulator/phone.I don't like Eclipse but I do like that it automatically launches my app on the emulator when I build it. It took some asking in IRC to figure out how to do this, but here it is:
adb shell 'am start -n your.package.name/.YourActivityName'So a full build+run command might look something like:
ant install && adb shell 'am start -n your.package.name/.YourActivityName'See what your app is saying with adb logcat.
Install exhuberant-ctags and run ctags -R src gen in the root
of your project to generate a tags file that many editors will
automatically use for autocompletion.
I'm planning on eventually writing a script that uses inotify
(inotifywait -m -r) to watch for source code changes and
automatically rebuild and re-scan the code with ctags. (Although I'm not sure
if editors will detect changes to the tags file on the fly... must research
that.)
There are some parts of Eclipse/ADT that don't really have direct replacements; for example, the wizards for editing AndroidManifest.xml. In this case you'll just have to edit it by hand, but if you're reading this then you're probably okay with that.
If there's anything I've missed, please leave a comment.
The Other IDEs page of the Android development documentation will fill in some of the simplifications I have made here and is recommended reading.
This Linux Magazine article is also worth looking through.