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🕹ī¸ Setting VSCode w/ clangd

The majority of the contributors and users uses Visual Studio Code. These guidelines should also help with non-vscoders as well.

Setup VSCode Configuration

Make sure you already install clang via getting started.

  1. Install VSCode if you haven't already done so.
  2. Go to the "Extensions" section on left-side of the bar. It looks like 4 blocks with the upper right-hand block disconnected from the other 3. Hover over the icons to get their name.
  3. Search for "C/C++" and disable the Windows intellisense extension if it is already installed and enabled.
  4. Search for the extension clangd and install the extension.
  5. Go to the clangd extension settings page. Find clangd extension and press the GEAR ⚙ī¸ icon to open in settings.
  6. Find the settings clangd: Arguments and add:
    1. In Clangd: Arguments input --header-insertion=never

Disable VSCode Default Intellisense

When using clangd it will conflict with Visual Studio Code's default intellisense. This is how you can disable it.

Follow the same setups above. In the intellisense sections in the extensions for "C/C++".

Check the disable checkbox as shown below

clangd intellisense

Disable auto-include headers

If you do not want auto-imported headers and are already including them if you have precompiled headers setup. This is how you can disable them.

Clangd arguments should look like this:

clangd arguments

Used in your own project

You can either add a self.requires("engine3d-cmake-utils/3.0") to your project or add the following lines to your CMakeLists.txt

# Generate compile commands for anyone using our libraries.
set(CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS ON)

# Always run this custom target by making it depend on ALL
add_custom_target(copy_compile_commands ALL
    COMMAND ${CMAKE_COMMAND} -E copy_if_different
    ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/compile_commands.json
    ${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}/compile_commands.json
    DEPENDS ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/compile_commands.json)

Run conan build . (where . is the path to your project/library) and it should generate the compile_commands.json file.

To ensure that the dependencies in your conanfile.py file that uses self.requires.

You can also run with -b missing (where -b missing indicates that to install any missing binary into the conan cache)

conan build . -b missing

How clangd works

Once you get clangd setup. Let me tell you how clangd works. Your workspace needs compile_commands.json file to be present or using .clangd in the root of your project's directory to be configured to know where to look for the location the compile_commands.json is located.

compile_commands.json tells clangd what commands you are using in order to determine exactly how your files are build and whjat commands are used to build them. Which provides the following benefits:

  1. More accurate warnings and error messages within your IDE.
  2. Faster response time because only the necessary includes for the specific version you are targeted will be used when evaluated.