Imagine: clang-tidy CMakeLists.txt -checks=modern-*
There are many blogs and videos out there telling us how to write modern CMake but having the mental capacity to stick to those guidelines is a different story.
Is there anything out there that would spew a warning on a bad practice? I am quite impressed how clang-tidy can suggest effective improvements to C++ code so doing the same for CMake code does not seem too far fetched.
If you’re using VSCode, the plug-in for CMake has a nice CMake-tidy extension.
Which plug-in/extension do you mean exactly? I tried installing the “CMake Tools” by Microsoft and “CMake” by twxs, but haven’t found anything about tidying (just nice syntax highlighting). Could you elaborate a bit on how to access this feature?
Note that I’ve only very recently started to use VSCode, so thanks in advance for your help!
If you right click inside a CMake list file, you’ll see a couple of options for “Format Document”. You can play around with them.
Format and syntax highlighting is one thing but actual best-practice linter is a different story which is what I am talking about.
The most basic example would be: you have a include_directories directive and the linter would produce a warning suggesting to use target_ include_directories instead.
Just with CMake and CMake Tools extension, I don’t have any additional options in the right click menu, it looks exactly as for other files. I looked a bit more now, and found the “cmake-format” extension. It provides the mentioned “Format Document” right click menu entry, however that doesn’t seem to do anything - after clicking that, there is no change whatsoever in the file…
Edit: Seems the “cmake-format” extension is just a bridge for calling the cmake-format tool (probably the one from cheshirekow/cmake_format @ github - looks like this also contains a cmake-lint! Or is it a part of that collection? They also provide a vsix file under release asses 
But the project seems a bit abandoned, no change since 3 years
Yeah, there are two entries when I right click
One says “Format Document [Ctrl+K Ctrl+D]”
The other says "Format Document With… "
Selecting the ‘with’ one, I get to formatters to choose from, “CMake-format” which does nothing, and another that says “CMake Language Support” and that’s the one that works…
As far as I can tell, the cmake-lint command I mentioned above is mostly reporting on what it considers formatting problems. It has a few style remarks as well (regarding variable, function and argument names), but I don’t know from which recomendations it pulls its recommendations. For example, for this line:
function (ExtractVersion filename identifier output_varname)
it brings up this message:
Invalid function name "ExtractVersion" doesn't match `[0-9a-z_]+`.
Apart from the formatting messages and such low level coding style remarks, I don’t see any “more useful” output at the moment, for example regarding modern CMake.