Do folks just develop inside the SDK itself?

[Nick]

I've been playing around with the SDK these past few days using both Keil and ARM GCC options. 

When people develop a product using this SDK, do they just clone one of the examples, keeping it inside the examples/xx directory and then develop directly inside the SDK?  It feels like with the way the SDK is laid out, references all over the place, creating a blank solution outside of the SDK examples directory leads to a lot of frustration.  

Is there a clean way to create a project outside of the SDK that references includes and libraries?  The Espressif IoT Development Framework (ESP IDF) does this beautifully with just a couple environment variables.

Nick

[Hein]

I copy the 'components', 'config' and 'external' folders from the SDK to my blank project, the contain everything you might want to include from the SDK (still over 100MB)

Then I set up my development environment project by looking at the make files for the example. They show you all the compiler flags, included folders and source files you need to add.

If you wanted to, you could then go through the SDK folders and delete all the unused source code after you complete the project.