A few notes regarding my attempts to streamline the development experience on Windows 10.
As Visual Studio Code becomes more feature rich, I find myself predominantly using it for C++ development instead of Visual Studio 2017. The speed, simplicity, built-in terminal and much improved font rendering make it a pleasure to use in comparison.
Essential Extensions
- cquery (must build from source on Windows currently)
- CMake Tools
- Microsoft C/C++ Extension
- vscodevim
- vscode-cudacpp for CUDA language highlighting
Configuration
- XCode Default Theme (Light)
- SF Mono Font
- Size 16
- Line Height 24
CMake Tools
A fantastic extension that can automatically find installed MSVC instances and use them to configure CMake. From there, we get a great CMake config/edit/run experience that is exceeds any other editors/IDEs I have tried.
Powershell Core
I prefer using PowerShell core over the version included with Windows 10. I have it configured as my default terminal and I use the following in my profile for a keyboard shortcut and autocomplete experience that achieves most of what I was missing from bash/zsh.
Set-PSReadlineOption -EditMode Emacs
Set-PSReadlineKeyHandler -Chord Tab -Function MenuComplete
Powershell and VCVars
Microsoft unfortunately doesn't provide first-class support for command-line C++ development with Powershell. Instead of opening a new development terminal with the proper development environment set each time, I use the VCVars Powershell module to load the variables from the cmd based toolset.
I added the following to my profile which is loaded into the default Visual Studio terminal:
$vc_env = Invoke-VCVars AMD64
setvc $vc_env
Now, I can use cmake --build . and devenv my_sln.sln to perform common CMake related tasks from the command line and open Visual Studio if needed.