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    • How-Tos page_name: visualstudio-tricks title: VisualStudio Tricks

Here is an incomplete stack of tricks to help you work with Chromium in Visual Studio.

Faster Solution Loading / IntelliSense

Loading a huge solution (like all.sln as generated by gn) makes Visual Studio very slow, and certain operations like IntelliSense can be somewhat unusable. Some tips for speeding it up:

  • Use Visual Studio 2022, which is significantly more responsive when dealing with large solutions, and less likely to crash with out of memory errors.
  • Use the “filters” argument to gn to exclude parts of Chromium you‘re not interested in, e.g. gn gen --ide=vs --filters=//components/omnibox/\* --sln=omnibox out/Debug will only create projects for components/omnibox/ and its dependencies. However, be aware that Code Search (see below) will not work on code that’s been filtered out!
  • A very useful extension which helps manage this is VsFunnel. This extension allows you to select which projects in a solution will be loaded at solution load time, and which will remain in the “unloaded” state. Unloaded projects are not indexed by VS, so this extension can drastically speed up VS responsiveness. The unloaded projects will remain searchable via VsChromium (see below).

After opening the solution, give Visual Studio about 10-15 minutes to finish parsing files etc; it'll become more responsive after that.

Code Search

The VsChromium extension provides fast code search, among other useful features. Code from unloaded solutions (via VsFunnel, see above) is still searchable!

Column Limit

You can set up column guidelines at 80 columns or wherever you would like by installing this Visual Studio extension and using the context menu options.

Once you've installed the extension, you can automatically add guidelines at the style-guide-specified line length limits for all Chromium languages as well as commit messages by downloading this .editorconfig file and placing it in the parent of your src/ checkout -- that is, the directory with your .gclient file in it. This will also set indenting size/style and other similar style defaults for Chromium. For more information on EditorConfig files, see here.

cpplint.py integration

cpplint.py integration makes it easy to check that a source file conforms to the style guide. To do this, just go to Tools > External Tools > Add. Specify:

  • Title: cpplint.py
  • Command: c:\src\depot_tools\cpplint.bat
  • Arguments: --output=vs7 $(ItemPath)
  • Initial directory: $(ItemDir)
  • Check Use Output window

To create a keyboard shortcut:

  1. Go to Tools > Options > Environment > Keyboard.
  2. Select Tools.ExternalCommand1. (This assumes cpplint.py is your first external command in your Tools menu.)
  3. Press a shortcut key (let's say Alt+L) and Assign it.
  4. Press OK.

Or, make the title something like c&pplint.py, and invoke it with Alt+t,p.

Text Editor (No tabs, indentation, line numbers)

The style guide requires no tabs and 2 char indentation. If you have copied in the .editorconfig file mentioned above, you should get this automatically (but only for files inside src/). If not, or to set this globally, go to Tools > Options. On the Text Editor/All languages/Tabs page, set

  • Indenting radio to Smart
  • Tab size and Indent size to 2
  • Check Insert spaces

Debugging visualization, macros, more

See https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/how-to-set-up-visual-studio-debugger-visualizers.