Posted on September 24, 2012 at 20:441) I've opted to dump everything in one directory for simplicity's sake. Under normal IDE's I'd use libraries and directory trees. The goal here was to make sure everything needed was there, and didn't have a whole lot of path or library dependencies. Basically if you have Yagarto set up you can make this.
2) Yes you can do things at a register/bit level if you want, and I might do that if I were programming an 8051, but in terms of quickly getting something portable, and not getting lost in the minutia of a specific part I'd stick with the library. I find people coding for the STM32 at the register level spend man-days of wasted time debugging stupid nuance in bits, and sequencing. With the library you can mix-and-match, so using TIM1->CCR1 = 100; is sometimes the efficient way to change a setting, but still use TIM_Init(), TIM_OCInit(), etc to do the heavy lifting.
3) I primarily use Keil/Realview, but use plain text editors (TSE/WordStar) for most command line work. Keil can debug the output from GCC, and also arbitrary code in a device. People seem to use Eclipse a lot for GCC, but personally I don't care for it, or it's project/workspace model. I like Segger J-Link devices for their general usability and function, but also use U-Link devices quite a lot. The ST-LINK used by the Discovery series boards is workable, but not a robust/commercial solution. Consider also Rowley's IDE, I quite liked the 1.6/1.7 version, although I think they hiked the price since then.
