Set Up Programming Environment in VSCode and CLion

CLion

IntelliSense

Setting up an intellisense environment is straightforward in CLion. Normally, a correct CMakeLists.txt is sufficient. However, in the example CMakeLists.txt, the project is divided into two parts, the main program and the code testing part. The testing part is compiled only when an option named BUILD_TEST is enabled, as demonstrated in the following:

if(BUILD_TEST)
    add_subdirectory(test)
endif()

In this condition, the option BUILD_TEST need to be switched on in CLion’s CMake profile. According to official documents, we can achieve this by adding -DBUILD_TEST=ON to CMake options in CLion’s CMake setting panel. This ensures that intellisense for codes of testing part works correctly.

VSCode

To efficiently configure the programming environment in VSCode, we recommend installing the following three extensions:

C/C++ Extension Pack
C/C++ TestMate
Python

IntelliSense

In VSCode, we can configure the C++ project similar to CLion by leveraging CMake. In additional to use the same CMakeLists.txt file as in CLion, we also need configure the CMake args in VSCode settings. Similarly, we can include -DBUILD_TEST=ON option in CMake: Configure Args panel within VSCode settings. After that, the CMake tools will try to build the project to build directory after each modification made to CMakeLists.txt, which will be used to enable intellisense. And we can build the project manually using build command provided by CMake Tools.

Test and Debug

Since we use Catch2 framework to test our C++ code, the extension C/C++ TestMate can help us to detect and run testing, and the executable files will be shown in VSCode’s test panel automatically. The debug process can be triggered in this panel.