How to search for COPY working with VSCODE

[Eugenio Di Lorenzo]

Hi
I'm trying to use VSCODE with COBOL BITLANG extension.
I managed to compile but I still don't understand why the compiler doesn't solve COPY search.
See attached screenshot for a sample on my error.
It says "gnucocol3 non found" but I don't use such directory, where that message come from ... ?
Any suggestion?

Second question.
Does anyone knows if it is possible to hide COBOL margins showed by VSCODE.
I always use FREE FORMAT so margins are unuseful an disturbing for me.

[Simon Sobisch]

Concerning 1: that is the normal cobc setup, just in tasks.json (or the tasks part in the workspace definition which I prefer as it also allows to use different settings per project). Ensure -I is passed correctly or COB_COPY_DIR includes your folders.
It shows an error message and then telling you that its GnuCOBOL3 matcher has recognized the error that cobc returned.

Concerning 2: the editor should show no margin if it is in Sourceformat:free mode, which it is according to the screenshot. I suggest to create an issue on https://github.com/spgennard/vscode_cobol about that.

Edit: side note: I highly recommend to not use the non-free Visual Studio Code which also ships with telemetry auto-enabled, but to use the free VSCodium instead (same codebase, extensions [all but the proprietary ones]) work the same).

[Rich Di Iulio]

Simon,

I would like to use VSCodium; however, Emacs Extension (from VSCodeEmacs) is not found in the repository. Unless, someone knows a way to fix that. There maybe others too. I just do not know what there are right now.

Rich Di Iulio

[Simon Sobisch]

Its expected that you don't find all extensions published at the MS marketplace "only to be used with Visual Studio products" (binaries not provided by Microsoft are explicit forbidden).
But you can always ask the author of your favorite extensions to co-publish on open-vsx.
As a sample how I did that in the past see https://github.com/VSCodeEmacs/Emacs/issues/15 :-)
As a workaround you can always install extensions from vsix "wherever you may got those from" (often from the release page on their repository).

For general guidelines about extensions see https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/DOCS.md#extensions-marketplace

[Simon Sobisch]

Does anyone knows if it is possible to hide COBOL margins showed by VSCODE.

yes, just set the editor.rulers array to nothing ...

I always use FREE FORMAT so margins are unuseful an disturbing for me.

if you'd have mixed for then you could use different languages for cbl/cob or path based or different setting and then only disable the rulers for the non-fixed variants, see https://github.com/spgennard/vscode_cobol/issues/257 for an idea how to do that

[Rich Di Iulio]

Simon,

I tried to set editor.rulers array to nothing and it did not work under Windows or Linux. I did click on the link and found my answer. Below is what I ended up putting in my settings.json file.

    "files.associations": {
        "*.cbl": "GnuCOBOL"
    },
    "coboleditor.fileformat": [
        {
            "pattern": "**/*.cob",
            "sourceformat": "free"
        },
        {
            "pattern": "**/*.COB",
            "sourceformat": "free"
        },
        {
            "pattern": "**/*.cbl",
            "sourceformat": "free"
        },
        {
            "pattern": "**/*.CBL",
            "sourceformat": "free"
        }
    ],

I too use free format.

I was able to setup codium to work just like VS Code. all my extensions are being used. Nice to use a true open source tool.

My next question is tab stops. I have setup my tab stops using "coboleditor.tabstops":. However, it starts at 5 and 4 spaces thereafter. How do I fix this?

Rich Di Iulio