dev-journal

Towards a sane Windows 10 C++/CUDA/CMake development experience

A few notes regarding my attempts to streamline the development experience on Windows 10.

Visual Studio Code

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.