0. VS Code for Delphi developers

Read this one first: F5 and F9 are swapped

They are exactly exchanged. Your first instinct — F5 to mark a line — starts the application instead, and F9 to launch it silently drops a breakpoint on whatever line the cursor was on. This costs everyone the same confused thirty seconds, so now you have had them here instead.

You can swap them back if you want to; see changing the keys below. Read the rest of this page before deciding.

Where the debug windows went

Delphi scatters its debug windows across the desktop and you summon them with Ctrl+Alt-something. VS Code puts nearly all of them in a single side bar panel: the Run and Debug view, opened with Ctrl+Shift+D. Inside it are collapsible sections, and those sections are your old windows.

The rest of the keys

Changing the keys

None of this is fixed. Ctrl+K then Ctrl+S opens the Keyboard Shortcuts editor: search for a command, click the pencil, press the combination you want. Everything you change is written to a keybindings.json you can version and share.

So you can put F9 back on Run and F5 back on Toggle Breakpoint, and if you spend most of your day in Delphi that may well be the right call — fighting your own muscle memory all day is a real cost.

Where things hide

Delphi puts its commands in menus. VS Code hides most of them, and knowing the four hiding places is most of what makes it usable.

• View title bars. Small icons at the top-right of a section — but only when the mouse is over that section. Edit Exception Rules and Toggle Raw Stack Scan live there, and you will never see them by staring at a stationary screen.
• Inline row icons. Some commands appear as an icon on a row when you hover it, not in its right-click menu. View Memory (Delphi) is one, so looking for it under right-click fails.
• The Command Palette — Ctrl+Shift+P, type a few letters of what you want. Everything this extension contributes is prefixed Delphi Debugger:, so typing that lists the lot. A handful are deliberately excluded because they only make sense on a row you clicked.
• The editor’s right-click menu while stopped, which is where Run to Cursor and Jump to Cursor are.

There is no project options dialog

Everything you would set in Project → Options — what to run, where the symbols are, where the sources are — is a JSON file, .vscode/launch.json. There is no dialog, and hand-writing it for a real Delphi project means transcribing a couple of hundred search paths.

Do not do that. The Edit in VS Code IDE plugin generates the whole thing from the project you already have open in Delphi. Chapter 1 covers what ends up in it.

Settings a Delphi codebase needs

VS Code’s defaults assume a codebase that is not yours. Five settings make it behave around Delphi sources, and the first one is not optional.

Encoding detection — the one that looks like corruption

"files.autoGuessEncoding": true

VS Code opens every file as UTF-8. Plenty of Delphi code predates that and is stored in a local ANSI code page, so the moment you open a unit with accented characters in it you get mojibake — and if you save, you write the damage to disk. Turning detection on fixes it. This is the setting that makes people conclude VS Code “does not work with Delphi” and give up in the first ten minutes.

Hide the build output

"files.exclude": {
  "**/Win32/Debug": true,
  "**/Win64/Debug": true,
  "**/__history": true,
  "**/__recovery": true,
  "**/*.res": true
}

Without this, the file tree and every search are full of build output and IDE backups. __history is the worst of them: it holds old copies of your own units, so a search for a routine name returns the current version and nine previous ones with no indication of which is which.

Stop the editor guessing indentation

"editor.detectIndentation": false

By default VS Code infers tabs-versus-spaces per file from what it finds. On a codebase with decades of mixed history that means the setting changes as you move between units, and your edits inherit whatever the file happened to have.

Let folding work on big units

"editor.foldingMaximumRegions": 8000

Folding gives up past a fixed number of regions, and a large Delphi unit blows through the default. It fails quietly — folding simply stops working, with no message.

Teach it that begin/end is a bracket pair

VS Code understands {} and (). It has no idea that begin and end belong together, so bracket matching and folding do nothing useful in Pascal until you tell it — the same for case/end, repeat/until, try/end.

One more, from the File menu

Turn on Auto Save. You will be switching between Delphi and VS Code constantly, and this way the file on disk is already current when you switch back. Note the asymmetry: Delphi does not auto-save when you leave it, unless you left through the plugin’s own Edit in Visual Studio Code command.

Next

That is the orientation. Chapter 1 is about getting your project compiled so the debugger has something to read — which is the other thing that stops people on day one, and has nothing to do with VS Code.