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In 2019, we started developing plugins for two IDEs: Visual Studio (VS) Code and Eclipse.

The CMake build system was key to better integrations with IDEs. Since then, new features, such as support for ESP32-S2, ESP32-C3 and ESP32-S3 chips, were added to the CMake-based build system only.

However, in ESP-IDF v4.0, released in February 2020, the CMake-based build system became the default one, and the Make-based one was demoted to “legacy” status. For this reason, we decided to keep supporting the Make-based build system in parallel with developing the new CMake-based one. While we tried to keep the overall “look and feel” of ESP-IDF similar between Make and CMake, this was still a significant change for many users who were working on already existing projects. To address these issues, in 2018 the ESP-IDF project started moving to a new build system which was based on CMake. This approach worked in many cases but, when it didn't (mostly on Windows), troubleshooting was complex. For a while, ESP-IDF documentation provided instructions on using Eclipse CDT with its GNU Make build system. The other issue was that adding GNU Make-based projects to integrated development environments (IDEs) was difficult to be done reliably. This meant much slower project builds on Windows, compared to those on Linux with the same hardware. The main one was that, on Windows, GNU Make required an emulation layer like MSYS or Cygwin. The build system did suffer from several issues, though. It worked quite well on Linux and macOS, which were the operating systems used by most Espressif developers at the time. The build system was quite flexible and allowed for the rapid use of the ESP-IDF codebase. When ESP-IDF was first released, it had a build system based on GNU Make at its core. This article describes a few recent improvements in this area. Over the past few years, we have received many requests from our customers to simplify the ESP-IDF installation process and usage. It was initially designed with a command-line-interface (CLI) usage in mind. ESP-IDF, the software development framework for the ESP32 series of chips, is in active development since 2016.