Visual Studio Code as a Lilypond IDE

(Beginners should first work through Lilypond + Frescobaldi setup)

Visual Studio Code is a powerful open-source IDE with a dizzying array of helpful extensions. It’s straightforward to install Lilypond extensions to turn VSCode into a powerful Lilypond IDE. (Many thanks to lhl2617 for creating the extension and suggesting edits to this page.)

Installing

You will need:

1. Install Lilypond 2.22: http://lilypond.org/download.html>
   • On windows, you need to change your PATH as described on the download page. For example, add this to your system path: C:\Program Files (x86)\LilyPond\usr\bin. This allows VSCode to find where lilypond is at.
2. Install Visual Studio Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/download
3. Clone our website for all the song examples: git clone https://github.com/kenakofer/hymnsinger.git

Configuring

To set up Visual Studio Code for Lilypond development:

1. Open Visual Studio Code
2. Choose “Open folder”, navigate to where the repository was downloaded, and click “Open” just inside. You should see a few files and directories, like README.md and docs/
3. Click on the Extensions icon tab on the left side of the screen (Ctrl+Shift+X)
4. Install the VSLilyPond extension (This will automatically install several extensions). These extensions:
   • run lilypond whenever a .ly file is saved;
   • generate PDF and MIDI outputs in the same directory
   • provide error highlighting, autocomplete, and code formatting
   • PDF viewer, where clicking on a note will place your cursor on that note in the source
   • midi playback (see below for configuration)
   • midi input for note entry (haven’t tried using this yet)
5. The installed extensions look like this:
6. Exit and restart VSCode for extensions to take full effect
7. Click on the Explorer icon tab on the left side of the screen (Ctrl+Shift+E)
8. Open the file dropdowns and double click lilypond/songs/angels-we-have-heard-on-high/angels-we-have-heard-on-high.ly (The code in the file should be colored by the syntax highlighter.)
9. Try saving (Ctrl-S). You should see the angels-we-have-heard-on-high/ directory get populated with some PDF files and a midi file.
10. Double click angels-we-have-heard-on-high-trad.pdf to open it. Optionally, drag the PDF file to the right side of the window, to open a second pane alongside the editor.
11. Find and replace “Kenan Schaefkofer” with your name, and re-engrave to see the change. Now you are the one doing the typesetting and (hopefully) making your contributions free for all!
12. Your setup may look something like this:
13. Buttons to play, pause, and stop MIDI playback are in the bottom bar, BUT they won’t work until you install and configure a MIDI synthesizer, and then in VSCode, use Ctrl-Shift-P to run a command, and enter vslilypond.setOutputMIDIDevice, then select the synthesizer currently running.

Creating a new song

Now that you have everything set up, read about Creating a new song