contribute.md

How to Contribute to CMake Tools

This article is for developers who want to contribute to the CMake Tools open source project.

Build the CMake Tools extension

As with most VS Code extensions, you'll need Node.JS installed. We use yarn to compile the code.

The process is:

1. Open the repo in VS Code

2. Press F5 to build and run the extension

Coding guidelines

Formatting

Code is formatted using clang-format. We recommend you install the Clang-Format extension.

Linting

We use tslint for linting our sources. You can run tslint across the sources from a terminal or command prompt by running npm run lint. You can also run npm: lint from the VS Code command pallette ry running the task lint command. Warnings from tslint show up in the Errors and Warnings pane and you can navigate to them from inside VS Code. To lint the source as you make changes, install the tslint extension.

Style

• Use inline field initializers whenever possible.
• Declare properties in constructor parameters lists, when possible.
• Use lowerCamelCase for public members, methods, variables, and function/method parameters.
• Use kebab-case (hyphen-separated-names) for files and directories.
• Prefix private members/methods with an underscore and write them _withCamelCase.

snake_case was used historically for variables in this repo, but we will be phasing that style out. All new variables should be lowerCamelCase.