2.1 The Welcome Dialog

When starting GPS, a welcome dialog is displayed by default, giving the following choices:

Create new project from template

If you select this option and then click the OK button, GPS will launch an assistant to create a project using one of the predefined project templates.

Start with default project in directory

If you select this option and click on the OK button, GPS will first look for a project called default.gpr in the current directory and load it if found. Otherwise, it will copy in the current directory the default project found under <prefix>/share/gps/default.gpr and load it. GPS will remove this copy when exiting or loading another project, if the copy has not been modified during the session.

If the current directory is not writable, GPS will instead load directly <prefix>/share/gps/readonly.gpr. In this case, GPS will work in a degraded mode, where some capabilities will not work (such as building and source navigation).

Create new project with wizard

Selecting this option and clicking on the OK button will start a wizard allowing you to specify most of the properties for a new project. Once the project is created, GPS will save it and load it automatically. See The Project Wizard for more details on the project wizard.

Several kinds of wizard are available. Depending on the kind of project, you will get asked different type of information. In the end, GPS will create one or more project files, and automatically load them.

One of the wizard, "From existing Ada sources", will try and import a set of sources and object files, and attempt to create one or more project files so that building your application through these project files will put the objects in the same directory they are currently in. If you have not compiled your application when launching this wizard, GPS will create a single project file and all object files will be put in the same object directory. This is the prefered method when importing sources with duplicate file names, since the latter is only authorized in a single project file, not across various project files.

Open existing project

You can select an existing project by clicking on the Browse button, or by using a previously loaded project listed in the combo box. When a project is selected, clicking on the OK button will load this project and open the main window.

Always show this dialog when GPS starts

If unset, the welcome dialog won't be shown in future sessions. In this case, GPS will behave as follows: it will first look for a -P switch on the command line, and load the corresponding project if present. Then, it will look for a project file in the current directory and will load the first project file found.

If no project file can be found in the current directory, GPS will start with the default project.

To reset this property, go to the menu Edit->Preferences. See The Preferences Dialog.

Quit

If you click on this button, GPS will terminate immediately.

When you specify a -P switch on the command line, or if there is only one project file in the current directory, GPS will start immediately with the project file specified, instead of displaying the welcome dialog.

In addition, if you specify source files on the command line, GPS will also start immediately, using the default project if no project is specified.

By default, files specified on the command line are taken as is and can be absolute or relative pathnames. In addition, if you prepend a filename with the = character, then GPS will look for the file in the source search path of the project.