Removing smart quotes from gcc output

A lot of programs can’t deal with the “smart quotes” gcc prints in it’s errors. If you have one program calling gcc and parsing the output, you might see something like:

foo.h:45: error: expected âââ}âââ at end of output

One fix I’ve found for this is to change the locale gcc uses for localization. You can do this using the LC_ALL environment variable (see the gcc man page). Setting its value to “C” normalizes the output to standard ASCII. In bash that’s:

export LC_ALL=C

SlickEdit: Pop to active file in the project browser

One feature I’ve come to rely on in Visual Studio is it selects the currently active file in the project explorer. By default, SlickEdit doesn’t have this functionality, but you can add it yourself. I found some kindred spirits on the SlickEdit forums that wanted the same behavior. Just add the code on the first page for showInProject() to a new .e file, then append the code on the second page for _switchbuf_auto_showInProject() to the bottom, load the .e file from the Macro -> Load Module menu, and you’re set!