Yes to all of the above, and had to script it too, which I couldn't do with an IDE at the time.
I indeed haven't used CCS-Eclipse in years. Has it finally eliminated its lag and RAM usage? I was always amazed how it managed to continuously stay just ahead of Moore's Law in terms of resource usage.
You're right, the lag was bad. Recently I haven't noticed it much, maybe I got used to it, or maybe it's been improved. Currently my instance of CCS 6.0.1 uses around 286MB of RAM, CCS 6.1.0 uses about 480MB of RAM. In comparison PyCharm (2016.1.4) is using 927MB of RAM :(
How did you debug code running on the hardware without an IDE? Is there an easy-ish way to do that?
gdb :)
Most in-system-debuggers expose a gdb-server interface, that a client gdb can then connect to. GDB is very scriptable.
I used to use ObjecTime, and it added random stuff to its C++/'C' code generation process that meant you were never fully SEI Level 2. We had to keep a Golden Build machine alive because of it.
> Embedded development requires very precise control and knowledge about what you're doing, and IDEs more often than not get in the way of doing that.
Embedded development requires precise control and knowledge about what you're doing, and that's precisely why you would want to use the manufacturer's recommended IDE. Have you ever tried managing development with an RTOS? Or streaming data out of RAM while your code was running? Or fiddling with the processor registers when debugging? IDE's make all that much simpler, you may want to give CCS an other chance, it's a really powerful IDE.