This blog post covers the tools I use and the configurations that I have found to work well for me personally. For context, most of these come from doing development as part of Cavalier Autonomous Racing. Development here is, by and large, more informal than the professional settings where I have worked. Therefore, these tools seek to strike a balance between being effective and strict and onerous.

A good example of this tradeoff is implicit conversions between float <-> double, size_t <-> uint32_t and int32 <-> long64. Spamming static_cast does not really make your program any better.

With that framing here are my configurations:

• .clangd or ~/.config/clangd/config.yml (link)
• .clang-format or ~/.config/clang-format (link)
• .clang-tidy or ~/.config/clang-tidy (link)

Aliases

My helpful aliases for Linux.

export CMAKE_GENERATOR=Ninja

alias pbcopy="xclip -sel clip"
alias ge="grep -Hrn --include"

My helpful aliases for MacOS

export CMAKE_GENERATOR=Ninja

alias ge="grep -Hrn --include"

VSCode Extensions

• plibither8.remove-comments
• llvm-vs-code-extensions.vscode-clangd

Tools

• cpp-ctx is a uv self-installing script for passing context into large language models about your local development setup. This properly formats everything into markdown block quotes, gives the file’s source location and more to give llms more information about your local workspace.