Tinkering My PS Vita Interlude: My Workspace

Jun 4, 2019

People usually are quite fussy with their development environment, and so do I. I use a text editor called Neovim as my main editor. For you who haven’t heard it, Neovim is a Vim-based text editor with extra features and a nice community. I will talk about my current workspace setup for writing Vita programs.

VitaSDK toolchain ¶

I use the recommended setup on the official webpage.

Linting ¶

I rely on ALE plugin for linting. ALE is compatible with gcc, which we use to compile our codes. However, it’s not fully working out of the box because it’s using default installation of gcc.

Below is my ALE configuration. It’s fairly self-explanatory, but the idea is to use the VitaSDK toolchain instead of installed gcc. I also add a directory containing shared headers that don’t belong to the toolchain.

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let g:ale_linters = {'c': ['gcc']}
let b:ale_c_gcc_executable = 'arm-vita-eabi-gcc'
let g:ale_c_gcc_options = '-std=c11 -Wall -I/home/adinb/projects/vita-playground/common'

I have a hardcoded path there, but I prefer this rather than having a global variable floating in the system because it’s easier to check and change if necessary. This piece of the parameter is system-specific as well, so I didn’t bother to make it more general.

Code completion ¶

I’ve been spoiled by IDE code completion, so I want that in my tools as well. Just look at this screenshot below. You can open the image in a new tab or window to see it more clearly.

For autocompletion, I use YCM. It has excellent C completion and diagnostic support. I also have to supply custom compile flags so it can provide completion for the headers. YCM provides an easy way to do this using .ycm_extra_conf.py inside the project root directory.

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import os

def Settings( **kwargs ):
    return {'flags': [ '-x', 'c++', '-Wall', f'-I{os.environ["VITASDK"]}/arm-vita-eabi/include', '-I../common'],}

Similar to the ALE configuration, I added extra include path. However, YCM only supports Clang for completer. That means I can’t use the gcc executable from VitaSDK. Fortunately, I can use Clang to provide the completion as long as I include the headers properly.

Neovim config file separation ¶

I want to keep my Neovim configuration as portable as possible because I sync my config across multiple PCs. The way this it’s done is by making Vita related configuration complementary since the configuration is system-specific.

This is how I have done it:

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set runtimepath+=~/.vim

" Main vim configuration file
source ~/.vim/vimrc

" Vita related configuration file
source ~/.vim/vita-vimrc

This way, I can keep the main configuration clean and commit it separately. If you’re interested in my main Neovim configuration, you can check it here.

Project specific config loader ¶

Because I also use Neovim to work on other projects, I want my Vita toolchain custom config to be applied just for Vita projects. To achieve that, I use the autocmd feature in Neovim. Simply put, the command will be executed every time I open a file inside my Vita workspace directory.

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" Set Ale to use Vita SDK toolchain for linter
autocmd BufRead */projects/vita-playground/*/*.c call SetALEVitaSDKToolchain()

function SetALEVitaSDKToolchain()
    let b:ale_c_gcc_executable = 'arm-vita-eabi-gcc'
    let g:ale_linters = {'c': ['gcc']}
    let g:ale_c_gcc_options = '-std=c11 -Wall -I/home/adinb/projects/vita-playground/common'
endfunction

Again, I have a hardcoded path in the config for the same reason as the ALE parameters one.

Emulator ¶

As previously explained here, I use Vita3K PSVita emulator. There’s no specific setup for the emulator. I just put the emulator somewhere easy to reach.

AdinB::Log

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