Prerequisites
VSCode is recommended for development. If nothing else, it has heaps of high quality extensions and atopile language support, plus it’s used internally - making it easier to configure for purpose.
You should have at a minimum:
Verbosity
You can increase the verbosity of atopile by using the -v, -vv or -vvv flags, for example ato -vv build
Flags are placed after the ato command and before the command you want to run. For example, ato -vv build runs the build command with the verbose flag set to the highest level, while ato build -vv will not work.
Debugging
You can start the command-line tool in debug mode by using the --debug flag, for example ato --debug build
This runs a debugpy server on port 5678 which you can connect to with the VSCode built-in debugger.
If you’re having trouble with syntax highlighting in the debugger, it might be because VSCode sets up a mapping between the remote and local file paths by default—remove it.