2.10.1 Searching for libraries

Searching for libraries is available under ’Plugins’ /’Library finder’ menu. It’s purpose is to detect libraries installed on your system and store the results inside LibFinder’s database (note that these results are not written into CodeBlocks project files). Searching starts with dialogue where you can provide set of directories with installed libraries. LibFinder will scan them recursively so if you’re not sure you may select some generic directories. You may even enter whole disks - in such case searching process will take more time but it may detect more libraries (see Figure 2.10).

When LibFinder scans for libraries, it uses special rules to detect presence of library. Each set of rules is located in xml file. Currently LibFinder can search for wxWidgets 2.6/2.8, CodeBlocks SDK and GLFW - the list will be extended in future.

After completing the scan, LibFinder shows the results (see Figure 2.11).

In the list you check libraries which should be stored into LibFinder’s database. Note that each library may have more than one valid configuration and settings added ealier are more likely to be used while building projects.

Below the list you can select what to do with results of previous scans:

Another option in this dialogue is ’Set up Global Variables’ . When you check this option, LibFinder will try automatically configure Global Variables which are also used to help dealing with libraries.

If you have pkg-config installed on your system (it’s installed automatically on most linux versions) LibFinder will also provide libraries from this tool. There is no need to perform scanning for them - they are automatically loaded when CodeBlocks starts.