IDE Setup

You can use one of the following IDEs for developing Geode mods. Using an IDE is highly recommended, as they will give you code completion, intellisense, and simplify developing mods. Our recommended IDE is VS Code, which we also have a dedicated extension for.

Visual Studio Code

VSCode on Windows

For VS Code, we recommend a few extensions:

There are a few steps you should follow to get proper intellisense and code completion (you should only need to do these once per project, ideally):

  1. With VS Code open on your project, press F1 and run CMake: Select a Kit. This will bring up a list of installed compilers on your machine.

Image showing a bunch of compilers CMake detected in VS Code

You should pick a Visual Studio 2022+ compiler (specifically the amd64 version), or Clang, but nothing else!

⚠️ Please pay attention to this

  1. Now to select the build variant, press F1 and run CMake: Select Variant. We recommend RelWithDebInfo for easier debugging, as Debug may sometimes cause obscure crashes.

Image showing available build types on Windows: Debug, Release, MinSizeRel, and RelWithDebInfo

  1. Register CMake as the Configuration Provider for the C++ extension by pressing F1 and running C/C++: Edit Configurations (UI). Scroll down to Advanced options, and set the Configuration Provider as ms-vscode.cmake-tools.

Image showing the “C/C++: Edit Configurations (UI)” command being run in VS Code

Now, build your mod by pressing F1 and running CMake: Build. You must build your mod first so that errors such as #include <Geode/modify/MenuLayer.hpp> not found go away. If the mod was built successfully, the exit code at the end should be 0. If any errors still persist after building the mod, try restarting VS Code.

VS Code on Mac

For VS Code on Mac, we recommend a few extensions:

There are a few steps you should follow to get proper intellisense (you should only need to do these once per project, ideally):

  1. With VSCode open on your project, press F1 and run CMake: Select a Kit. You should choose Clang.

Now, build your mod by pressing F1 and running CMake: Build. You must build your mod first so that errors such as #include <Geode/modify/MenuLayer.hpp> not found go away. If the mod was built successfully, the exit code at the end should be 0. If any errors still persist after building the mod, try restarting VS Code.

VSCode on Linux

The setup is very similar to VSCode on Mac, so you can follow that. The primary difference is you have to manually create a kit, which can be done like so:

  1. Open the Command Palette (with F1 or Ctrl + Shift + P) and run the command CMake: Edit User-Local CMake Kits (requires the CMake Tools extension and an opened CMake project)

  2. Add a new kit to the list:

{
    "name": "Geode Windows 64-bit",
    "compilers": {
        "C": "/usr/bin/clang",
        "CXX": "/usr/bin/clang++"
    },
    "isTrusted": true,
    "toolchainFile": "${userHome}/.local/share/Geode/cross-tools/clang-msvc-sdk/clang-msvc.cmake",
    "cmakeSettings": {
        "HOST_ARCH": "x86_64",
        "SPLAT_DIR": "${userHome}/.local/share/Geode/cross-tools/splat",
        "CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS": 1
    }
}

If the toolchain and/or splat weren’t installed via geode sdk install-linux, modify the paths accordingly.

Additionally, if you have Ninja installed, it’s a good idea to set it as the generator instead of make, as it’s much faster and uses multiple CPU cores by default unlike make. Add this to the JSON object above:

"preferredGenerator": {
    "name": "Ninja"
}

Now, you should be able to select the kit and build mods!

Additionally, while this does not affect 90% of people, if you use SIMD intrinsics or include a library that does, you might get strange compile/link errors with the configuration above. This can be fixed by changing the compiler from clang to clang-cl, like so:

Visual Studio

Some Visual Studio experience is recommended before you try to use this, but if you don’t then you’ll probably be fine.

Modern Visual Studio can handle CMake projects automatically, so assuming your VS has CMake support, just open your mod project folder. You’ll know it’s working if a console opens up at the bottom of your Visual Studio, and it starts gathering information from CMake.

Now, before you build, make sure to change these settings (these need to be changed in every single project you make):

  1. Click the Debug options (This is usually a drop-down menu at the top of your screen that says “x64-Debug”)
  2. Click “Manage Configurations” inside that drop-down

Image showing the Manage Configurations button in the drop-down

  1. Change config type to Release or RelWithDebInfo. We recommend RelWithDebInfo, since it provides easier debugging. You cannot use Debug for this!
  2. Make sure the toolset is set to x64
  3. At this point you can also give your configuration a friendly name such as “default” or “release” or something like that
  4. And make sure to use Ctrl + S to save your changes

Here’s an example of a configuration that should work:

Image showing a config that should work

Now you may build your mod, by pressing F7 or Ctrl + B (If those keybinds don’t work, click Build at the top, then either Build or Build All)

If there are errors similar to VS Code (such as #include <Geode/modify/MenuLayer.hpp> not found) after you’ve built, restarting Visual Studio should make them go away.

CLion

No additional plugins are needed - the only thing you need to do is to set the CMake options correctly. When you open your mod’s directory in CLion for the first time, you’ll be met with an Open Project Wizard:

Image showing the CLion Open Project Wizard

Here you need to make sure that:

  1. Build type is set to Release or RelWithDebInfo; it cannot be Debug
  2. Toolchain is set to Visual Studio
  3. Generator is set to Visual Studio 17 2022 or newer
  4. Build directory is set to build

In the end it should look like this:

Image showing the CLion Open Project Wizard set up for Geode

Now you can press OK and CMake will run for the first time. The setup will fail until you build the project for the first time. In order to do that, go to the top right corner of the window where you’ll see a dropdown saying Add Configuration.

Image showing the CLion Add Configuration dropdown

Click it and choose Edit Configurations and you’ll be met with the Run/Debug Configurations window. Inside of it, click the plus button in the top left corner of the window and choose CMake Application from the popup:

Image showing the CLion Run/Debug Configurations window

In the created configuration, click the Target dropdown and choose All Targets. You can also change the name to something else than “Unnamed”.

Image showing the CLion Run/Debug Configurations window with a configuration set up to compile the mod

Once that’s done, you can click Apply and then OK. If it hasn’t already, wait for CMake to finish its run. It might look something like this, with a line at the end saying [Failed to reload].

Image showing the failed CMake run output

Now click the hammer icon in the top right corner next to build the mod for the first time - make sure that the dropdowns next to it say RelWithDebInfo and Build Mod (or however you called your build task in the step before):

Image showing the build button in CLion

The build should end with a message saying Build finished and (assuming you ran geode config setup before) the mod should now be installed to Geometry Dash. In order to make all the IDE features work correctly, reload CMake now, this run should end successfully with a message saying [Finished] at the end:

Image showing how to rerun CMake in CLion

Don’t forget to reload CMake after you add new files to the project.