Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a very lightweight and useful IDE (text editor) for programming, offered by Microsoft. It offers many great features that help us in our daily lives as programmers and will make using the framework much less of a headache if you are new to programming or C/C++ in general.

Setting Everything Up

1. First, download and install VS Code. If you already have it, skip this step. Once that is done installing you will also need the C/C++ Extension for intellisense and code completion, which we will configure in the next steps.

2. Press Ctrl + shift + p top open the command palette, then type C/C++: Edit Configurations (JSON). You can also edit the configuration via the UI if that's more your style, but you wont be able to change the configuration name.

3. Copy and Paste the template below into the file. You will need to change /path/to/devkitpro to your actual installation directory. On Windows, this defaults to C:/devkitPro. For Linux, it's usually /opt/devkitpro. Don't forget to change it in compilerPath as well!

4. You're done! There is still more that can be set up, such as setting up build tasks for make and clean, but that isn't strictly necessary for writing plugins and we will cover that in a separate section. For now, VS Code has a built in command line that you can use to make and clean so you don't need a CLI separate window open

{
    "configurations": [
        {
            "name": "SaltySD Plugin",
            "includePath": [
                "/path/to/devkitPro/devkitA64/aarch64-none-elf/include/**",
                "/path/to/devkitPro/devkitA64/lib/gcc/aarch64-none-elf/8.3.0/include/**",
                "/path/to/devkitPro/libnx/include/**"
            ],
            "defines": [
                "SWITCH",
                "__SWITCH__",
                "DEBUG"
            ],
            "compilerPath": "/path/to/devkitPro/devkitA64/bin/aarch64-none-elf-g++",
            "cStandard": "c11",
            "cppStandard": "c++17",
            "intelliSenseMode": "gcc-x64"
        }
    ],
    "version": 4
}