One feature that may greatly assist the onboarding process is offer the user the ability to automatically setup one or more of the supported Ada IDEs or Editors. After Alire completing the initialization process, Alr configures the necessary environment variables and or generates the appropriate files. It could also prompt the user to launch the crate after it's completed. There's many approaches, the simplest way is to add an option such as --ide which access from several Editors or IDEs such as VSCode or GNATStudio.

For VSCode, it can automatically create the .vscode directory and the launch.json and settings.json files needed. In addition, it would be helpful to install or suggest to the user useful extensions for Ada development such as debuggers and AdaCore's Ada Extension.

There are two ways of doing providing this support. By default, Alire can create an extension a file (.vscode/extensions.json). It doesn't install any extensions, but suggests them for installation:

{
    "recommendations": [
        "eg2.tslint",
        "dbaeumer.vscode-eslint",
        "msjsdiag.debugger-for-chrome"
    ]
}

The other way is to automatically install them automatically from VSCode's command-line:

$ code -h
Visual Studio Code 1.16.0

Usage: code [options] [paths...]

Options:
  --extensions-dir <dir>                                       Set the root path for extensions.
  --list-extensions                                            List the installed extensions.
  --show-versions                                              Show versions of installed extensions, when using --list-extension.
  --install-extension (<extension-id> | <extension-vsix-path>) Installs an extension.
  --uninstall-extension <extension-id>                         Uninstalls an extension.
  --enable-proposed-api <extension-id>                         Enables proposed api features for an extension.
  --disable-extensions                                         Disable all installed extensions.