I recently added CMake support to Macaroni after growing incredibly frustrated with how long it took to compile some apps with Boost Build on my ancient Acer Aspire One. Because CMake can generate Visual Studio project files, this meant I was able to easily work on Macaroni projects again in Visual Studio.
Unfortunately, Visual Studio 2013 seems to have be more hostile towards Macaroni than its 2008 iteration; syntax is still correctly highlighted, but the IDE adds scribbles to almost everything. Worst of all, it refuses to jump to errors in Macaroni source code when you click on them in the IDE even though it's own compiler is outputting the appropriate lines. I actually used to use VS2008 with Macaroni all the time several years ago and had a good experience, so VS2013's intolerance for mcpp files (possibly arising from the fact it's improved as a C++ IDE) is a bit sad. The end result is I stick to Sublime and the command line when writing and testing code and use VS2013 when I need the debugger.
However, not being able to click on those errors really was a bummer, and perhaps its what led me do something to improve the experience of using Boost Build on the command line. The worst part of using it today is that while Macaroni itself has colorized output, when it runs Boost Build the affair is strictly monochromatic, meaning I've gotten very good at scanning through dozens or even hundreds of lines of text to find the one or two error messages that caused the failure. It looks something like this:
So, in about two mornings worth of time last weekend I created Bjolt, which runs bjam and colorizes its output as well as formatting long lines to make them easier to read in Windows. Now it looks more like this:
So far it finds errors and warning from the Visual C++ compiler and linker, as well as error messages from Boost Test. In the future I'll probably add support for GCC and Clang (ironically Clang has beautiful colorization, but Boost Build unfortunately ruins it).