First things first, download Visual Studio Code. Then download MSYS2 and follow the instructions there.
After installing the prerequisites, we need to install gcc delivered by the mingw-toolchain. For this, start MSYS2 MinGW 64-bit and type pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain. Restart MSYS2 MinGW 64-bit and verify that gcc has been installed correctly with gcc -v.
Start Visual Studio Code and press Ctrl+Shift+x to open Extensions. Download C/C++ package for Intellisense, debugging, and code browsing.
Do the same procedure for Code Runner.
Press Ctrl+, or go to File->Preferences->Settings and the User Settings will open up. Everything that you want to edit or customize will take place there. At first, we have to link VSCode with the shell of MSYS2. On windows, the integrated shell is Window Powershell. Paste the following code in to your User Settings.
{
"window.zoomLevel": 0,
"terminal.integrated.shell.windows": "C:\\msys64\\usr\\bin\\bash.exe",
"terminal.integrated.shellArgs.windows": ["-i"],
"terminal.integrated.env.windows": { "PATH" : "/mingw64/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/c/Windows/System32:/c/Windows:/c/Windows/System32/Wbem:/c/Windows/System32/WindowsPowerShell/v1.0/"}
}
Restart the terminal or VSCode and verify that you have bash as an integrated shell instead of Windows Powershell.
Using Coderunner we can compile and run code with CtrlAltN. For this, we have to specify our build command and a few options in our user setting. Expand the settings.json with
{
"window.zoomLevel": 0,
"terminal.integrated.shell.windows": "C:\\msys64\\usr\\bin\\bash.exe",
"terminal.integrated.shellArgs.windows": ["-i"],
"terminal.integrated.env.windows": { "PATH" : "/mingw64/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/c/Windows/System32:/c/Windows:/c/Windows/System32/Wbem:/c/Windows/System32/WindowsPowerShell/v1.0/"},
"code-runner.executorMap": {"cpp" : "g++ -std=c++17 $fileName -o $fileNameWithoutExt && ./$fileNameWithoutExt.exe" },
"code-runner.runInTerminal": true,
"code-runner.ignoreSelection": true
}
In this snippet, gcc will compile the .cpp file with the C++1z standard, allowing fold-expressions, constexpr if etc...
Code Runner of course should run in the terminal we have setup and code-runner.ignoreSelection is set to true to always run the entire file and not a selection which has been done unpurposely.