Visual Studio Code For Mac

  



Microsoft has released a new version of source-code editor Visual Studio Code that runs natively on Apple Silicon Macs like the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini models with Apple M1 chips.

The change came in Visual Studio Code 1.54 (now 1.54.1, thanks to a bug fix update), which is available as a universal 64-bit binary, as is standard for apps with Apple Silicon support. That said, Microsoft also offers downloads for x86-64 and Arm64 versions specifically, if desired.

Download Visual Studio Code for macOS. Open the browser's download list and locate the downloaded archive. Select the 'magnifying glass' icon to open the archive in Finder. Drag Visual Studio Code.app to the Applications folder, making it available in the macOS Launchpad. Download Visual Studio Community, Professional, and Enterprise. Try Visual Studio IDE, Code or Mac for free today. MacOS Modern is a set of Visual Studio Code themes styled to match native macOS as closely as possible. Updated to include dark + light versions and a few minimal icon themes. Reapply both (icon and color) themes if you have problems. I HIGHLY recommend using the settings below for best results.

There are no differences in features between the two versions, of course. And the non-Apple Silicon version worked just fine on M1 Macs previously via Rosetta, but Microsoft says M1 users can expect a few optimizations with the new binaries:

We are happy to announce our first release of stable Apple Silicon builds this iteration. Users on Macs with M1 chips can now use VS Code without emulation with Rosetta, and will notice better performance and longer battery life when running VS Code. Thanks to the community for self-hosting with the Insiders build and reporting issues early in the iteration.

Other key features in Visual Studio Code 1.54 include the ability to retain terminal processes on window reload, performance improvements in the Windows version, product icon themes, improvements when viewing Git history timeline entries, and various accessibility improvements.

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This is the latest in a slow march of productivity and power user apps that have launched native Apple Silicon versions, such as Adobe Photoshop. But many popular apps are still not native, including Visual Studio Code's IDE sibling Visual Studio 2019 for Mac.

However, native Apple Silicon support is expected to come to Visual Studio 2019 for Mac with .NET 6, which is expected to ship in November. The first .NET 6 preview was distributed last month.

Many makers of development and creative production software have committed to releasing Apple Silicon versions of apps, including Adobe and Unity. But others, like Autodesk, haven't made much noise about Apple Silicon support yet.

Apple is expected to shift its entire Mac lineup to the new architecture by the end of 2022. Reports citing people familiar with Apple's plans have indicated that more Apple Silicon-based MacBook Pros are coming this year, as well as significant redesigns for both the iMac and MacBook Air, which will also have Apple Silicon chips.

In this tutorial, you configure Visual Studio Code on macOS to use the Clang/LLVM compiler and debugger.

After configuring VS Code, you will compile and debug a simple C++ program in VS Code. This tutorial does not teach you about Clang or the C++ language. For those subjects, there are many good resources available on the Web.

If you have any trouble, feel free to file an issue for this tutorial in the VS Code documentation repository.

Prerequisites

To successfully complete this tutorial, you must do the following:

  1. Install Visual Studio Code on macOS.

  2. Install the C++ extension for VS Code. You can install the C/C++ extension by searching for 'c++' in the Extensions view (⇧⌘X (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+X)).

Ensure Clang is installed

Clang may already be installed on your Mac. To verify that it is, open a macOS Terminal window and enter the following command:

  1. If Clang isn't installed, enter the following command to install the command line developer tools:

Create Hello World

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From the macOS Terminal, create an empty folder called projects where you can store all your VS Code projects, then create a subfolder called helloworld, navigate into it, and open VS Code in that folder by entering the following commands:

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The code . command opens VS Code in the current working folder, which becomes your 'workspace'. As you go through the tutorial, you will create three files in a .vscode folder in the workspace:

  • tasks.json (compiler build settings)
  • launch.json (debugger settings)
  • c_cpp_properties.json (compiler path and IntelliSense settings)

Add hello world source code file

In the File Explorer title bar, select New File and name the file helloworld.cpp.

Paste in the following source code:

Now press ⌘S (Windows, Linux Ctrl+S) to save the file. Notice that your files are listed in the File Explorer view (⇧⌘E (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+E)) in the side bar of VS Code:

You can also enable Auto Save to automatically save your file changes, by checking Auto Save in the main File menu.

The Activity Bar on the edge of Visual Studio Code lets you open different views such as Search, Source Control, and Run. You'll look at the Run view later in this tutorial. You can find out more about the other views in the VS Code User Interface documentation.

Note: When you save or open a C++ file, you may see a notification from the C/C++ extension about the availability of an Insiders version, which lets you test new features and fixes. You can ignore this notification by selecting the X (Clear Notification).

Explore IntelliSense

In the helloworld.cpp file, hover over vector or string to see type information. After the declaration of the msg variable, start typing msg. as you would when calling a member function. You should immediately see a completion list that shows all the member functions, and a window that shows the type information for the msg object:

You can press the Tab key to insert the selected member. Then, when you add the opening parenthesis, you'll see information about arguments that the function requires.

Build helloworld.cpp

Next, you'll create a tasks.json file to tell VS Code how to build (compile) the program. This task will invoke the Clang C++ compiler to create an executable file from the source code.

It's important to have helloworld.cpp open in the editor because the next step uses the active file in the editor as context to create the build task in the next step.

From the main menu, choose Terminal > Configure Default Build Task. A dropdown will appear listing various predefined build tasks for the compilers that VS Code found on your machine. Choose C/C++ clang++ build active file to build the file that is currently displayed (active) in the editor.

Visual Studio Code For Mac Os X

This will create a tasks.json file in the .vscode folder and open it in the editor.

Replace the contents of that file with the following:

The JSON above differs from the default template JSON in the following ways:

  • 'args' is updated to compile with C++17 because our helloworld.cpp uses C++17 language features.
  • Changes the current working directory directive ('cwd') to the folder where helloworld.cpp is.

The command setting specifies the program to run. In this case, 'clang++' is the driver that causes the Clang compiler to expect C++ code and link against the C++ standard library.

The args array specifies the command-line arguments that will be passed to clang++. These arguments must be specified in the order expected by the compiler.

This task tells the C++ compiler to compile the active file (${file}), and create an output file (-o switch) in the current directory (${fileDirname}) with the same name as the active file (${fileBasenameNoExtension}), resulting in helloworld for our example.

Visual Studio Code For Mac Os

The label value is what you will see in the tasks list. Name this whatever you like.

The problemMatcher value selects the output parser to use for finding errors and warnings in the compiler output. For clang++, you'll get the best results if you use the $gcc problem matcher.

The 'isDefault': true value in the group object specifies that this task will be run when you press ⇧⌘B (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+B). This property is for convenience only; if you set it to false, you can still build from the Terminal menu with Terminal > Run Build Task.

Note: You can learn more about tasks.json variables in the variables reference.

Running the build

Visual Studio Code For Mac Tutorial

  1. Go back to helloworld.cpp. Because we want to build helloworld.cpp it is important that this file be the one that is active in the editor for the next step.

  2. To run the build task that you defined in tasks.json, press ⇧⌘B (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+B) or from the Terminal main menu choose Run Build Task.

  3. When the task starts, you should see the Integrated Terminal window appear below the code editor. After the task completes, the terminal shows output from the compiler that indicates whether the build succeeded or failed. For a successful Clang build, the output looks something like this:

  4. Create a new terminal using the + button and you'll have a new terminal with the helloworld folder as the working directory. Run ls and you should now see the executable helloworld along with the debugging file (helloworld.dSYM).

  5. You can run helloworld in the terminal by typing ./helloworld.

Modifying tasks.json

You can modify your tasks.json to build multiple C++ files by using an argument like '${workspaceFolder}/*.cpp' instead of ${file}. This will build all .cpp files in your current folder. You can also modify the output filename by replacing '${fileDirname}/${fileBasenameNoExtension}' with a hard-coded filename (for example '${workspaceFolder}/myProgram.out').

Debug helloworld.cpp

Next, you'll create a launch.json file to configure VS Code to launch the LLDB debugger when you press F5 to debug the program.

From the main menu, choose Run > Add Configuration... and then choose C++ (GDB/LLDB).

You'll then see a dropdown for predefined debugging configurations. Choose clang++ build and debug active file.

VS Code creates a launch.json file, opens it in the editor, and builds and runs 'helloworld'. Your launch.json file will look something like this:

The program setting specifies the program you want to debug. Here it is set to the active file folder ${fileDirname} and active filename ${fileBasenameNoExtension}, which if helloworld.cpp is the active file will be helloworld.

By default, the C++ extension won't add any breakpoints to your source code and the stopAtEntry value is set to false.

Change the stopAtEntry value to true to cause the debugger to stop on the main method when you start debugging.

Ensure that the preLaunchTask value matches the label of the build task in the tasks.json file.

Start a debugging session

  1. Go back to helloworld.cpp so that it is the active file in the editor. This is important because VS Code uses the active file to determine what you want to debug.
  2. Press F5 or from the main menu choose Run > Start Debugging. Before you start stepping through the source code, let's take a moment to notice several changes in the user interface:

  • The Integrated Terminal appears at the bottom of the source code editor. In the Debug Output tab, you see output that indicates the debugger is up and running.

  • The editor highlights the first statement in the main method. This is a breakpoint that the C++ extension automatically sets for you:

  • The Run view on the left shows debugging information. You'll see an example later in the tutorial.

  • At the top of the code editor, a debugging control panel appears. You can move this around the screen by grabbing the dots on the left side.

Step through the code

Now you're ready to start stepping through the code.

  1. Click or press the Step over icon in the debugging control panel so that the for (const string& word : msg) statement is highlighted.

    The Step Over command skips over all the internal function calls within the vector and string classes that are invoked when the msg variable is created and initialized. Notice the change in the Variables window. The contents of msg are visible because that statement has completed.

  2. Press Step over again to advance to the next statement (skipping over all the internal code that is executed to initialize the loop). Now, the Variables window shows information about the loop variable.

  3. Press Step over again to execute the cout statement. Note As of the March 2019 version of the extension, no output will appear in the DEBUG CONSOLE until the last cout completes.

Set a watch

You might want to keep track of the value of a variable as your program executes. You can do this by setting a watch on the variable.

  1. Place the insertion point inside the loop. In the Watch window, click the plus sign and in the text box, type word, which is the name of the loop variable. Now view the Watch window as you step through the loop.

  2. To quickly view the value of any variable while execution is paused, you can hover over it with the mouse pointer.

C/C++ configuration

For more control over the C/C++ extension, create a c_cpp_properties.json file, which allows you to change settings such as the path to the compiler, include paths, which C++ standard to compile against (such as C++17), and more.

View the C/C++ configuration UI by running the command C/C++: Edit Configurations (UI) from the Command Palette (⇧⌘P (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+P)).

This opens the C/C++ Configurations page.

Visual Studio Code places these settings in .vscode/c_cpp_properties.json. If you open that file directly, it should look something like this:

You only need to modify the Include path setting if your program includes header files that are not in your workspace or the standard library path.

Compiler path

compilerPath is an important configuration setting. The extension uses it to infer the path to the C++ standard library header files. When the extension knows where to find those files, it can provide useful features like smart completions and Go to Definition navigation.

Visual Studio Code For Mac Tutorial

The C/C++ extension attempts to populate compilerPath with the default compiler location based on what it finds on your system. The compilerPath search order is:

  • Your PATH for the names of known compilers. The order the compilers appear in the list depends on your PATH.
  • Then hard-coded XCode paths are searched, such as /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin/

Mac framework path

Visual studio code for mac tutorial

On the C/C++ Configuration screen, scroll down and expand Advanced Settings and ensure that Mac framework path points to the system header files. For example: /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks

Reusing your C++ configuration

VS Code is now configured to use Clang on macOS. The configuration applies to the current workspace. To reuse the configuration, just copy the JSON files to a .vscode folder in a new project folder (workspace) and change the names of the source file(s) and executable as needed.

Troubleshooting

Compiler and linking errors

The most common cause of errors (such as undefined _main, or attempting to link with file built for unknown-unsupported file format, and so on) occurs when helloworld.cpp is not the active file when you start a build or start debugging. This is because the compiler is trying to compile something that isn't source code, like your launch.json, tasks.json, or c_cpp_properties.json file.

If you see build errors mentioning 'C++11 extensions', you may not have updated your tasks.json build task to use the clang++ argument --std=c++17. By default, clang++ uses the C++98 standard, which doesn't support the initialization used in helloworld.cpp. Make sure to replace the entire contents of your tasks.json file with the code block provided in the Build helloworld.cpp section.

Terminal won't launch For input

On macOS Catalina and onwards, you might have a issue where you are unable to enter input, even after setting 'externalConsole': true. A terminal window opens, but it does not actually allow you type any input.

The issue is currently tracked #5079.

The workaround is to have VS Code launch the terminal once. You can do this by adding and running this task in your tasks.json:

You can run this specific task using Terminal > Run Task... and select Open Terminal.

Once you accept the permission request, then the external console should appear when you debug.

Next steps

  • Explore the VS Code User Guide.
  • Review the Overview of the C++ extension
  • Create a new workspace, copy your .json files to it, adjust the necessary settings for the new workspace path, program name, and so on, and start coding!