Brent Williams JustBarnt

How to use clangd C/C++ LSP in any project

tl;dr: If you want to just know the method, skip to How to section

Clangd is a state-of-the-art C/C++ LSP that can be used in every popular text editors like Neovim, Emacs or VS Code. Even CLion uses clangd under the hood. Unfortunately, clangd requires compile_commands.json to work, and the only way to painlessly generate it is to use CMake.

But what if I tell you you can quickly hack your way around that, and generate compile_commands.json for any project, no matter how compilcated? I have used that way at work for years, originaly because I used CLion which supported only CMake projects - but now I use that method succesfully with clangd and Neovim.

Method summary

Basically what we need to achieve is to create a CMake file that will generate a compile_commands.json file with information about:

	let mapleader=" "
	let maplocalleader="\\"

	set vsvim_useeditordefaults
	set number
	set expandtab
	set ignorecase
	set incsearch
	set hlsearch
	set smartcase

	typeset -U PATH path

	export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8

	# ~/ Clean-up:
	export XDG_CONFIG_HOME="$HOME/.config"
	export XDG_DATA_HOME="$HOME/.local/share"
	export XDG_CACHE_HOME="$HOME/.cache"

	export ZDOTDIR="${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/zsh"

	if hash nvim 2>/dev/null; then
	export EDITOR=nvim
	export MANPAGER='nvim +Man!'
	else
	export EDITOR=vim
	fi

	# set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists
	if [ -d "$HOME/.local/bin" ] ; then
	PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

	using Microsoft.Data.SqlClient;

	using System.Data;

	namespace ScratchBoardCSharp;

	public class Program
	{
	static void Main(string[] args)
	{

	<?php
	//Arrays to randomly select for MADLIB
	$noun_array = array('house', 'car', 'person', 'cat', 'dog');
	$verb_array = array('run','jump','wave','bite','purr');
	$color_array = array('black', 'blue', 'purple', 'red', 'green');
	$dist_array = array('meters', 'centimeters', 'inches', 'feet', 'light years');

	//Base Vars
	$num_of_stories = 3;

	{
	"env": {
	"browser": true,
	"node": true
	},
	"root": true,
	"extends": [
	"eslint:recommended",
	"plugin:@typescript-eslint/recommended"
	],