Multiple commands/tasks with Visual Studio Code

Question

I have a local folder that I use as a scratch pad for multiple little sample and toy pieces of code. I store a host of python, C++, shell scripts etc. in this directory.

I'm using Visual Studio Code (on OS X) and am looking into its tasks to run/compile the code snippets without having to switch to a terminal.

For example, I found this following task will run python on the currently open file.

// A task runner that runs a python program
{
    "version": "0.1.0",
    "command": "/usr/bin/python",
    "args": ["${file}"]
}

This task will use python as the task runner irrespective of the type of file I'm currently editing.

How do I implement a task to run a command based on the file type (or select between multiple commands)? I.e. if I'm editing a C++ file, it will run clang++.

• If I can't do it based on file type; are there any alternatives to this?
• An alternative would be; are multiple commands supported?

Answer 1

You can always use bash as your task runner and then assign arbitrary terminal commands as your tasks.

{
    "version": "0.1.0",
    "command": "bash",
    "isShellCommand": true,
    "showOutput": "always",
    "args": [
        "-c"
    ],
    "tasks": [
        {
            "taskName": "My First Command",
            "suppressTaskName": true,
            "isBuildCommand": true,
            "args": ["echo cmd1"]
        },
        {
            "taskName": "My Command Requiring .bash_profile",
            "suppressTaskName": true,
            "args": ["source ~/.bash_profile && echo cmd2"]
        },
        {
            "taskName": "My Python task",
            "suppressTaskName": true,
            "args": ["/usr/bin/python ${file}"]
        }
    ]
}

A few notes on what is happening here:

• Using bash -c for all tasks by putting it in args list of the command so that we can run arbitrary commands. The echo statements are just examples but could be anything executable from your bash terminal.
• The args array will contain a single string to be passed to bash -c (separate items would be treated as multiple arguments to the bash command and not the command associated with the -c arg).
• suppressTaskName is being used to keep the taskName out of the mix
• The second command shows how you can load your ~/.bash_profile if you need anything that it provides such as aliases, env variables, whatever
• Third command shows how you could use your Python command you mentioned

This will not give you any sort of file extension detection, but you can at least use cmd+p then type "task " to get a list of your tasks. You can always mark your 2 most common commands with isBuildCommand and isTestCommand to run them via cmd+shift+b or cmd+shift+t respectively.

This answer has some helpful information that might be useful to you as well.