The .vscode folder I use for building krita on windows, though the scripts can also be run by themselves as well. Mostly publishing this for myself but I tried to make it configurable, and maybe others can find it useful for building on windows in general.

Works pretty well, includes are understood, you can navigate to definitions, etc, autocomplete is slow as hell but works. Debugging seems to work although honestly I do not launch the debugger much at all.

Installing/Configuring

VS Code

Extensions used:

C/C++ (required) - Also includes handy command Switch Header/Source. Qt tools - Lets you open .ui files in Qt Creator + provides debugger extensions (via natvis files). CMake Tools - Only because Qt Tools needs it. I did not have time to read the docs and it was just easier to create scripts+tasks, it's disabled from auto running in the included settings.

Other Useful Extensions:

SVG Gallery - for quickly browsing icons quick-run-panel - for quickly launching tasks Rewrap - for wrapping comments/commits

Setup

Clone the repo so it's your .vscode folder inside the krita source folder. To ignore the folder without touching the .gitignore, copy the included git-info-exclude:

copy ".vscode\git-info-exclude" ".git\info\exclude" 

Configure all the parts that say TOCONFIGURE inside settings.json. You can check they're correct by running the Echo VS Code Variables task.

Configuring Scripts

Open env.bat and configure all the variables inside the TOCONFIGURE region.

Note that in both VS Code and the scripts there are some env variables named DIR_* and PATH_*. These are system wide variables I have set for convenience (I use a program called Rapid Environment Editor, it's great). You can ignore them and set hardcoded paths.

To be able to run the scripts from anywhere without VS Code, you will need to set a KRITA_SCRIPTS_DIR env variable that points to the folder the scripts are kept. This way the scripts can run env.bat and take care of cd-ing to the right folders.

If using the VS Code's terminal, the variable is set in the settings.json and is therefore available to all terminals it launches.

Usage

Assuming you've not tried to build anything yet, the order of the scripts is usually:

1. Deps Configure (Prebuilt)
2. Deps Build
3. Configure - if you get an error about ECM (By not providing "FindECM.cmake" in CMAKE_MODULE_PATH...) it's because you didn't run Deps Configure+Build, or you did but something went wrong and the dependencies weren't installed.
4. Run (this is just Build + Just Run)

If you did try to configure something before, delete the folders, or at least CMakeFiles and CMakeCache.txt inside them. Otherwise you probably won't be able to configure the folders since you've probably configured them with -G "MinGW Makefiles" instead of ninja.

Then after that just run Run as needed. See note in Other Notes for how to avoid clean builds.

Other

There are some extra tasks that open/delete things for convenience, those are VS Code tasks only.

Then there's also the tools/backup-config script which will incrementally backup %LOCALAPPDATA%/kritarc, %LOCALAPPDATA%/kritashortcutsrc, and %APPDATA%/Krita/resourcescache.sqlite into a folder backups inside the scripts directory.

tools/incremental-copy.bat is just a dependency.

Other Notes

• Clean builds are triggered if you switch branches in git 😭 (it's fine if the branch points exactly to the current HEAD though). To avoid them I recommend checking out a worktree somewhere like %KRITA_DEV_DIR%/krita-worktree. Go there when you want to see code in other branches, etc.

• I usually configure with translations off since it takes slightly longer to build. They can be turned on and the project reconfigured without triggering a clean build.

• The Open resourcescache.sqlite task assumes DB Browser is installed.

• The secret to getting vscode to understand everything is configuring the project with -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON and setting compileCommands to it in c_cpp_properties.json.

• If you're using an SSD, the C++ extension is known to cache huge amounts of data, you migh want to set C_Cpp.intelliSenseCachePath and C_Cpp.default.browse.databaseFilename in your user settings.

• Tests do not work out of the box, they must be copied from the build directory to the install directory or they just all fail. My test script takes care of it.

• Windows builds should always be built in RelWithDebInfo mode, Debug is broken as far as I understand.

• Prebuilt dependencies only "build" and install once. If you delete the install folder and try to "build" them again nothing will happen, hence the Deps Clean task.

• Variable expansion on windows is weird. If using something like Rapid Environment Variable to edit them, it might look like variables will expand correctly in the program, but they don't in the command line. Unfortunately the simplest thing, short of trying to alphabetically order paths 🤮, seems to be to avoid nesting. Have only PATH be expandable and constructed from other non-expandable variables (e.g. PATH_*), which can only contain hardcoded paths, no referencing useful variables (e.g. DIR_*) 😩.