mkcws

Summary

A simple command line application in order to create new Code workspaces.

License

This project's license is GPL 2. The whole license text can be found in LICENSE in the main directory of this repository. The brief version of the license is as follows:

Copyright (C) 2021 Kevin Matthes

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.

Introduction

Many IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) offer the possibility to create projects in order to group project related files. The same goes for compilations of the VS Code source code, such as VS Code and VSCodium, for instance, which will be named "VSC-like IDEs" in the following. But often, the way of how a project is defined as one differs from IDE to IDE. Hence, people who are new to a certain IDE might wonder how this is processed in the concerning IDE.

For VSC-like IDEs, there are the *.code-workspace files which define a certain directory on the machine's file system to be a workspace for the IDE. This specification is made by using a JSON-like syntax. Hence, workspaces can not only be created from within the IDE during a session, but also before the first session in this workspace since the used format can be edited by hand and any arbitrary editor due to the fact that is just plain text.

This application, mkcws, is one possible solution in order to automate the process of workspace creation. It is designed to be a simple command line application which creates the workspace according to different given parameters which are as follows:

the used coding language
the intended project name
the path of the directory with all related project files

The name mkcws is an abbreviation of "make a new Code workspace" and is inspired by the UNIX commands for creation, such as the one for directories: mkdir.

Build process

Building this project is very simple since it does not depend on anything except the C standard library. This project can be build by executing the following command in a terminal:

make

Other compilers than gcc are possible, as well, if desired. Therefore, the variable CC in makefile should be adjusted.

The command above will build the application and test it with valgrind right after the compilation finished. In order to ensure this test to succeed, users should make sure that they have a valid valgrind installation. In general, users should take a look at the variable settings of the build routine before building the application in order to avoid unnecessary errors due to incorrect settings regarding their system configuration.

To build without any tests, run:

make mkcws

Usage

The usage of mkcws is very simple. Within a terminal, one just needs to call

mkcws

in order to create a new Code workspace in the current working directory. The new workspace's name will be determined as follows:


   
    !
    
     .code-workspace

This procedure ensures the workspaces to be sorted by their main coding languages such that even after a long period of time during which nothing was edited, the project can still be easily identified. This style has proven quite intuitive and good usable, especially in the case that some projects might share their names but differ regarding their coding languages.

At the moment, the application accepts all parameters just statically in a predefined order, such that neither the count of the parameters nor their order may be altered without unexpected results. The mandatory order of the arguments is as follows:

main coding language
project name
path to the project's root directory

In case that less or more than three parameters are given to the application, it will show an error message and list all given parameters.

In case that the parameter's order was mixed up for some reasons, the application will proceed as instructed with the result that the final workspace will not meet the actual expectations.