Visual Studio Code with C/C++

This is just a small repo for testing VSCode setup for using with C/C++ on various platforms.

The original and very good instructions on how to do it all are here: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/cpp

Using with CYGWIN

Setup

Make sure you have cygwin installed and you have the g++ and gdb packages. Those may not be installed by default, so check it out:

which g++
which gdb

should yield something like this:

~ > which g++
/usr/bin/g++
~ > which gdb
/usr/bin/gdb

Clone the repo. Make sure you check out the correct branch, if the default one is not what you want.

Open a CYGWIN terminal, i.e. not a Git one or a Windows terminal!

cd to the repo that you cloned and start code from there, e.g.:

~ > cd /e/GitHub/vscode-cpp
/e/GitHub/vscode-cpp >code .

By starting from a cygwin terminal, you set-up code with all the cygwin-ish environment vars, so it can find g++, gdb.exe and all sorts of DLLs without specifying full paths. This should hopefully save some trouble!

In case some .exe cannot be found and full Windows paths are needed

If something cannot be found, here is how one can discover the full windows path of an executable, e.g. gdb:

cygpath.exe -aw `which gdb`

If this needs to be added to any config file, one will likely have to add the .exe extension and escape the \-s to end up with something like this: "C:\\cygwin64\\bin\\gdb.exe" (on my machine I have cygwin installed in c:\cygwin64).

Building, running, debugging

If all goes well, ctrl-shift-B should make it build. Or, run it from the Tasks menu. Or search the build command globally - ctrl-shift-P.

Then F5 will start a run. One can set breakpoints and inspect variables.