I'm new to dlang from c++ and am irreparably spoiled by the features available in Visual Studio.

Highlighting, tooltips, autocomplete, 'find all references', definition/declaration lookup, etc are critical to my workflow, not only for producing code but also for learning the language and libraries and exploring existing codebases.

I have not been able to use those features in VisualD or Mono-D.
I am confident that I followed the installation instructions for each of those.

The VisualD plugin appears partially functional, the added menu appears and 'search symbol' gives the expected results.
There is only very minimal highlighting - keywords and basic types only, no user types, functions, or operators - and the syntax error detection is absent or broken, failing to detect blatant errors while also exhibiting false-positives.
Autocomplete either fails to do anything, or when it does appear it shows only a fraction of the expected tokens.
The typical right-click menu features of goto-def/decl and find-all-refs do nothing, though that may be normal.

Mono-D is slightly more operational, highlighting is more complete although user types and functions are still missed. There is no error highlighting to speak of.
Autocomplete works partially. Language keywords, stdlib, and basic types are present.
Some user functions do appear in autocomplete, others do not, this appears to be determined by their import distance.
Often, a user type will show only 'init, mangleof, sizeof, stringof' in its autocomplete, even if it is defined in the same module.
Goto-def works only if the desired definition is in the same module. The option does not even appear for other tokens. Find-refs does not work at all.

I'm sure there are more problems that I missed, and that my descriptions could be better, but working around these problems has exhausted my patience for today.

The #d irc had some helpful people, but no progress was made on solving these issues.

Maybe there is something fundamental I missed in the install procedures, I don't know.

I've been using Visual Studio Code and although it isn't perfect, it does do a good enough job. The only thing is there is no debugging on Windows for it. I've been able to get the C/C++ extension debugger working on Linux, as it interfaces with lldb and gdb with "mi". There is no debugger on Windows that provides that interface, there is mago-mi but I've looked at it and a lot of the features aren't implemented. If Microsoft implements a debugger using the mi interface, then it should end up working on Windows eventually. It's probably one of the most requested features, so I don't doubt they are working on it.

VisualD doesn't seem to be supported anymore, it's been a while since a new version has been released. Haven't had too many problems with VS Code w/ code-d though, it is a bit of a pain to install but the go-to def works most of the time. There are some cases where it doesn't work, like for functions that are using UFCS. Also I debug on a virtual machine in Linux, can't debug Windows but can at least debug there using a graphical interface w/ code.

On Monday, 29 August 2016 at 06:02:59 UTC, John wrote:

>
> VisualD doesn't seem to be supported anymore, it's been a while since a new version has been released.

VisualD is still under development. See the recent blog post about it [1]. Rainer has been busy, but a preview of the next release has been available for a while. Contributions are always welcome.

[1] http://dlang.org/blog/2016/08/12/project-highlight-visual-d/

I did try the VSCode plugin, but I receive the error

'workspace-d' is not a valid executable.

I can't understand why every one of these fails.
There doesn't seem to be any information available to help diagnose these problems.

On Wednesday, 31 August 2016 at 05:38:26 UTC, nonstatement wrote:
> I did try the VSCode plugin, but I receive the error
>
> 'workspace-d' is not a valid executable.
>
> I can't understand why every one of these fails.
> There doesn't seem to be any information available to help diagnose these problems.

Manually setting the workspace-d path rids that error, now I get

Could not initialize DCD. See console for details!

Yet the console is empty. Laughable.

After manually correcting the workspace-d / dcd directories in VSCode I now recieve:

Workspace-D is unresponsive. Auto completion might not work

The workspace-d executable does run, what could cause this?

Reinstalled the code-d plugin, no more error messages, but it doesn't appear to be doing anything.

I am fucking baffled that this is so difficult.

It would be so wonderful to actually accomplish something productive in D.
Am I wasting my time, or are any of these tools actually possible to use?

I'd be happy to troubleshoot but there is nearly zero information available to assist that.

On Sunday, 28 August 2016 at 07:15:08 UTC, nonstatement wrote:
>

I can't comment on other IDE functionality, but if you're ever looking for a nice debugging experience on Windows I'd have to recommend OllyDbg: http://forum.dlang.org/thread/ytfknvknmvmbhxqttuse@forum.dlang.org

I use it every day on my D code, with the help of CV2PDB. Olly is seriously dope, it changed my life.

On Wednesday, 31 August 2016 at 06:57:16 UTC, nonstatement wrote:
> Reinstalled the code-d plugin, no more error messages, but it doesn't appear to be doing anything.
>
> I am fucking baffled that this is so difficult.
>
> It would be so wonderful to actually accomplish something productive in D.
> Am I wasting my time, or are any of these tools actually possible to use?
>
> I'd be happy to troubleshoot but there is nearly zero information available to assist that.

It's best to put open an issue directly at the tool as the maintainers might not be observing this thread:

https://github.com/Pure-D/workspace-d
https://github.com/Pure-D/code-d

Btw in case you can reduce your love of VS, there are many editor with decent D support:

http://wiki.dlang.org/IDEs
http://wiki.dlang.org/Editors