Question

Visual Studio insists that it has to create executables in bin/Debug/ instead of just bin/, when using CMake.
Is there a way to fix this?

Answer 1

Yes, but is not really pretty…

You will need to update the RUNTIME_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY, LIBRARY_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY and ARCHIVE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY properties on ALL your targets. And you will need to do this for every configuration (Debug, RelWithDebInfo, etc.)

The easiest way is to do this “globally” with their CMAKE_… equivalents. E.g. check the following sample which sets bin/ and lib/ as the “global” binary/library output-directories:

# First for the generic no-config case (e.g. with mingw)
set( CMAKE_RUNTIME_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/bin )
set( CMAKE_LIBRARY_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/lib )
set( CMAKE_ARCHIVE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/lib )
# Second, for multi-config builds (e.g. msvc)
foreach( OUTPUTCONFIG ${CMAKE_CONFIGURATION_TYPES} )
    string( TOUPPER ${OUTPUTCONFIG} OUTPUTCONFIG )
    set( CMAKE_RUNTIME_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY_${OUTPUTCONFIG} ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/bin )
    set( CMAKE_LIBRARY_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY_${OUTPUTCONFIG} ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/lib )
    set( CMAKE_ARCHIVE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY_${OUTPUTCONFIG} ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR}/lib )
endforeach( OUTPUTCONFIG CMAKE_CONFIGURATION_TYPES )

Alternatively, you can try to run through all the available targets and modify its properties afterwards…

Note that this does not set the location of your .pdb files. I still have not found a satisfying way to put all the relevant .pdb files in the bin/ directory.