In Vim-land, I use the vim-test plugin for quickly executing tests from a command line shortcut1. I wanted to reproduce this behavior in Visual Studio Code, but I couldn’t find an extension that worked in multiple languages (namely, Ruby, Elixir, Javascript, and Elm). I’m mostly just using VSCode for Elixir, but I still liked the idea of finding a more general purpose solution.
So instead I used VSCode’s support for Tasks to build the functionality myself. So in my project’s tasks.json file, I have the following 3 tasks for running all tests, a single test (whatever is under the cursor), and the current file’s tests.
{
"version": "2.0.0",
"tasks": [
{
"label": "mix test",
"type": "shell",
"group": "test",
"command": "mix test",
"presentation": {
"echo": true,
"reveal": "always",
"focus": false,
"panel": "shared",
"clear": true
}
},
{
"label": "single test",
"type": "shell",
"group": "test",
"command": "mix test ${relativeFile}:${lineNumber}",
"presentation": {
"echo": true,
"reveal": "always",
"focus": false,
"panel": "shared",
"clear": true
},
"runOptions": {
"reevaluateOnRerun": false
}
},
{
"label": "test current file",
"type": "shell",
"group": "test",
"command": "mix test ${relativeFile}",
"presentation": {
"echo": true,
"reveal": "always",
"focus": false,
"panel": "shared",
"clear": true
},
"runOptions": {
"reevaluateOnRerun": false
}
}
]
}
Next, I setup keyboard shortcuts to run these. You can access this json file by going to Preferences –> Keyboard Shortcuts, and then clicking the {} icon. I used alt-t and alt-shift-t for single test and current file, respectively. I didn’t create one for running all of the tests because I don’t do that frequently enough to warrant a shortcut.
{
"key": "alt+t",
"command": "workbench.action.tasks.runTask",
"args": "single test",
"when": "editorLangId == elixir"
},
{
"key": "alt+shift+t",
"command": "workbench.action.tasks.runTask",
"args": "test current file",
"when": "editorLangId == elixir"
},
-
I have an article about this, but my setup has since changed to use this plugin instead. ↩