Hi,

I work in a small, independent scientific lab in a university in the United States, and it has come to my notice that, compared with a lot of practices that are ostensibly followed in the industry, like daily checkout into a version control system, use of a single IDE/editor for all languages (like emacs), etc, we follow rather shoddy programming practices.

So, I was thinking of getting together all my programs, scripts, etc, and building a streamlined environment to increase productivity. I'd like suggestions from people on Stack Overflow for the same. Here is my primary plan.: I use MATLAB, C and Python scripts, and I'd like to edit, compile them from a single editor, and ensure correct version control.

(questions/things for which I'd like suggestions are in italics)

1] Install Cygwin, and get it to work well with Windows so I can use git or a similar version control system (is there a DVCS which can work directly from the windows CLI, so I can skip the Cygwin step?).

2] Set up emacs to work with C, Python, and MATLAB files, so I can edit and compile all three at once from a single editor (say, emacs)

(I'm not very familiar with the emacs menu, but is there a way to set the path to the compiler for certain languages? I know I can Google this, but emacs documentation has proved very hard for me to read so far, so I'd appreciate it if someone told me in simple language)

3] Start checking in code at the end of each day or half-day so as to maintain a proper path of progress of my code (two questions),

• can you checkout files directly from emacs?

• is there a way to checkout LabVIEW files into a DVCS like git?

Lastly, I'd like to apologize for the rather vague nature of the question, and hope I shall learn to ask better questions over time. I'd appreciate it if people gave their suggestions, though, and point to any resources which may help me learn.