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

[tesc]

I usually keep projects inside the SDK, but instead of having my own projects in an "<sdk folder>/examples/xx" folder I create a new path of folders from the <sdk folder> so that the project can be put "on the same level" as the example projects. Then I copy an example project into that location and start from there. E.g. from "<sdk folder>/examples/ble_peripheral/ble_app_hrs" to "<sdk folder>/my projects/project name/ble_app_hrs", and then also change the folder name from "ble_app_hrs" to whatever makes sense.

Do note however that my use case is fairly uncommon. I often have to quickly set up projects that I get from others, and which are usually based on SDK examples. Or I have to quickly test something based off of an SDK example. I rarely have to set up a "real" project that is supposed to grow big and fill a particular purpose, and I rarely need to migrate to a new SDK version.

I would love to hear more about what other people do, when setting up a custom project and when porting an existing one from one SDK to another. I also appreciate any feedback on what can be improved in the SDK when it comes to setting up and porting your projects.

Regards,
Terje