STM32 with Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is more an editor with debugger support than a full IDE, it takes a bit fiddling to set up and get right. Basically you don’t have any setup screens and have to edit your project in files with XML syntax. I am not sure if I will use this for everything, but VSCode has definitely come to stay – it simply is to handy to have around as code editor for various things alone.

VSCode itself is a framework that allow extensions to be added, and extensions exist for a lot of things. STM32 is currently supported through PlatformIO (www.platformio.org). Sadly the STM32 support is still a bit limited, so I have not been able to test to much and setting it up is a bit fiddly. PlatformIO IDE is not really free – they maintain a community version, but that seems to lack essential features to be of any real use.

One annoying issue with VSCode is that it’s folders are physical within a hierarchy – myself I arrange the project on top with a strict set of sub-folders. What IDE people use differs with developer so I like to hide this in sub-folders. That does however not prevent me from editing

All in All – Visual Code got my interest, but I am not sure about Platform IO yet – neither am I sure I actually could commit a full project to VSCode alone.

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