If you're not familiar with using a terminal or invoking command-line tools like make, we'd recommend learning a bit about those first. We'll try to step through, as much as possible, how the VS Code/Arduino CLI pair can be used to develop an Arduino library, but a lot of what we'll cover can be adapted to new Arduino core development or even simple Arduino sketch-writing. This tutorial will demonstrate how to use a VS Code to build for and program an Arduino - all without ever opening the comfortable-yet-restricting Arduino IDE. Arduino CLI provides us a command line interface that can be passed to tools like make or a shell via the IDE. Downloading new board definition files.Īrduino CLI is the 'glue' we'll use to pair the VS Code IDE with common Arduino compilation and upload tools.The Arduino CLI provides a command-line interface for such tasks as:

We're not shilling for VS Code in this tutorial but it may be hard, at times, to hide our admiration for the well-done editing tool.Īlso critical to this tutorial is Arduino's recently (pre-)released Arduino CLI. We'll focus on using Microsoft's free, open-source VS Code editor in this tutorial, but a lot of the concepts should translate to other IDE's like Eclipse, Netbeans, or anything else you may prefer. Once you take the time to learn these tools they make programming in C/C++ (or any language, really) so much more efficient. This tool allows you to run 'make', 'grep', or any of your favorite terminal commands without ever swapping windows.

Integrated Terminal - Whether you use bash or the Windows CMD, an integrated terminal can save you loads of time.

Refactoring - Need to overhaul a function's naming scheme? Or convert a common block of code into a function that can be more widely-used throughout your application? Sounds like a refactoring job! A modern IDE can help with that.

Version control integration - Whether you're using git or SVN, many modern IDE's provide source-control integration that can show, line-by-line, the changes you've made since your last commit.

Auto-Complete - This feature can, of course, help complete long constant names, but it can also provide insight into the parameters that a function may expect.

Code navigation - Whether it's find-by-reference (instantly navigating to the definition of the function you're using), search-by-symbol (quick navigation to function or symbol definitions within a file), or a quick link to a compilation error, code navigation is critical to managing large code bases.

The Arduino IDE lacks a number of 'professional' code-assistance features, like: VS Code used to edit an Arduino sketch file while viewing a library's.

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