Fresh from Delphi XE2 to Lazarus -- need a few pointers in the right direction..

[EganSolo]

Folks,
I've tried Lazarus a few years back and it wasn't stable enough for my needs. About to upgrade from Delphi XE2 to XE6, I thought I should good old Laz another whirl...

I'm impressed. I managed to convert a core project to Lazarus/fpc in one afternoon. Lazarus has features that Delphi lacks or does poorly such as auto-generation of methods with the proper signature, handling of regions, include files, a tighter and cleaner pascal thanks to objfpc mode. All in all a great environment to work with.

I have a few usability-related questions, and I'm hoping some of these would be easy to take care of.

1. Is there a similar concept to ProjectsGroup in Delphi where the project explorer could show multiple projects and allows me to switch between them, pick which one is active?

2. When I test my code, it would be nice if the set of windows open switch from editing to debugging (so the fpDOC window is hidden, and the breakpoint, stack, watches, window show-up?

3. It must be me, but whenever I try to add a package "available for installation", and I click "Save and Rebuild IDE" I get a message that says  "one or more required packages were not found. See package graph for details," and that view does not seem to be able to tell me which package is missing? Do I need to reinstall Lazarus from scratch?

Thanks for any suggestions, you may have!

[Mike.Cornflake]

1. Is there a similar concept to ProjectsGroup in Delphi where the project explorer could show multiple projects and allows me to switch between them, pick which one is active

2. When I test my code, it would be nice if the set of windows open switch from editing to debugging (so the fpDOC window is hidden, and the breakpoint, stack, watches, window show-up?

Not that I've found.  I miss both these items too, so if you do find equivalents, I'd love to know about it.

3. It must be me, but whenever I try to add a package "available for installation", and I click "Save and Rebuild IDE" I get a message that says  "one or more required packages were not found. See package graph for details," and that view does not seem to be able to tell me which package is missing?

Yeah, I don't get a lot of mileage from that dialog either.  It's one of those that I'm sure, if I knew what was going on, would be useful...

Do I need to reinstall Lazarus from scratch?

Doubt it.  We just need to identify what the problematic package is.

Have a look in the left hand pane of "lazarus" - "Packages" - "Install/Uninstall Packages" (see attached image)

Any odd looking icons in that list?  Somewhere (sorry, don't know where) there is a list of what the different icons are.

In fact, when you click "Save and Build IDE" you get presented with a list of what Packages will be added, and which will be unchanged.  Let us know what's in the list of new packages....

[BigChimp]

3. It must be me, but whenever I try to add a package "available for installation", and I click "Save and Rebuild IDE" I get a message that says  "one or more required packages were not found. See package graph for details," and that view does not seem to be able to tell me which package is missing? Do I need to reinstall Lazarus from scratch?

Have a look at tools/package links. You can let it show only invalid lpk files. Perhaps that helps.
(I don't very often have problems with missing packages when recompiling - maybe I'm lucky??)