Why?

Visual Studio Code is an increasingly popular editing and coding tool. When working on a DUECA project, it can give you visual code formatting, indicate syntax and coding errors, and support building and debugging your code. For those reasons (and because I am also using it), some support was added to the dueca-gproject script for optimally using vscode.

Basic installation (Ubuntu/Debian)

You can head over to the Visual Studio website, but I prefer to install the open-source version of this editor, VSCodium. This variant does not include the tracking and "call home" functionality of Visual Studio. To install it on Ubuntu or Debian, run the following (see also instructions on the website):

wget -qO - https://gitlab.com/paulcarroty/vscodium-deb-rpm-repo/raw/master/pub.gpg \
    | gpg --dearmor \
    | sudo dd of=/usr/share/keyrings/vscodium-archive-keyring.gpg

echo 'deb [ signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/vscodium-archive-keyring.gpg ] https://download.vscodium.com/debs vscodium main' \
    | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vscodium.list

sudo apt update && sudo apt install codium

Extensions

To get optimum functionality, some additional software and plugins in Codium are needed. First, for C++ formatting and error checking support, install:

sudo apt install clang-format

Then I recomment the following extensions, using the extension manager ("four blocks" icon in VSCode/Codium):

"Native Debug", by webfreak
"Python", by ms-python
"Black Formatter", by ms-python
"Markdown All in One", by yzhang
"CMake", by twxs
"clangd", by llvm-vs-code-extensions
"Scheme", by jeandeaual
"XML", by redhat
"autoDocstring", by njpwerner

The "clangd" extension has one (to me) annoying feature, in that it tries to add header files for functions that you type automatically. This may not be the header file that you need, and for me it often broke a compilation. If you want to stop that (as you should), go into its settings, and add the argument "--header-insertion=never".

Use

Before use of the extensions and settings, first do a one-time configure (and compile) of your project, and install default configuration files for your VSCode/Codium, in your project folder, run:

# configure & compile
dueca-gproject build --debug

# default configuration files
dueca-gproject build --vscode

If you have multiple projects, repeat this for each project. You should now a set of additional files there. Since you can easily re-generate these, it is better if you do not enter these into git, unless you needed to modify these, e.g., to add another debug configuration in the launch.json.

compile_commands.json
.clang-format
.vscode/launch.json
.vscode/tasks.json
.vscode/settings.json

Run codium in your project by starting, from the project folder, with:

codium .

Formatting

With a C++ file in the editor, you can now press (Ctrl+Shift+I) to run the formatting.

Build

From any file, you can run (Ctrl+Shift+B) to build your project.

Debug run

Using the "Run and Debug" icon, or (Ctrl+Shift+D), you can start the debugger. Debugging will be done for the solo/solo node. If you have special wishes (debugging for a different node, commandline arguments), you can adapt the '.vscode/launch.json` file, and then add this file to version control.