Visual Studio Code

Extensions

There are several Visual Studio Code extensions designed to make working with the DM language easier and faster.

To use them, you'll need Visual Studio Code, a free editor.

The primary extension you'll want are:

• DM Language Support - Adds syntax highlighting for .dm, .dmm and .dme files.

• DM Language Server - Allows you to do things like this:

It also has auto-complete, proc helpers as you type, and many other useful features.

Other extensions

• Open - Allows you to open any file in VSC in your default program for running that file. This is useful to open up icon files for the visual editors, as VSC will not open them properly.

• Bookmarks - Helps mark your place in the code, useful if you do a lot of jumping around between files.

• Gitlens - Displays the little in line unobtrusive git blames, and a few other informational git related things to help you look up the history of the code.

• Rainbow Brackets - Colorizes opening and closing bracket pairs so that it's much easier to see if you have placed them correctly.

Build tasks

By default, the DM Language Client above includes a 'Build BYOND' task to compile within VSC. You'll need to add this task snippet to your tasks.json file, and editing the path to your dreamdaemon.exe file.

        {
            "label": "Run Test Server",
            "group": "test",
            "command": "C:/PATH/TO/BYOND/bin/dreamdaemon.exe",
            "args": ["${workspaceRoot}/baystation12.dmb", "-invisible", "-verbose"]
        }

• Verbose is optional, but it forces dreamdaemon to continue outputting full runtime error information. Without it, it can actually cut off some of the runtime info, very important in testing!

• Invisible keeps it from being listed on the hub.

• Once is an optional switch you can use which stops the server automatically once you log out (but it leaves dreamdaemon running)

Further Reading

This wiki entry is meant to be brief, there's lots more that you can configure to make your life easier over on the Setting up VSCode for developing with baystation thread. If you wish, look at the second post.