Use minted syntax highlighting in LaTeX with Visual Studio Code LaTeX Workshop

Syntax highlighting in LaTeX is traditionally done with listings. However, as many pointed out, this is a defective solution because the listings package does not have a lexer. Recently, the minted package seems to emerge as a standard and preferred solution to syntax highlighting in LaTeX. This package is now part of the TeXLive distribution.

minted requires Pygments as an external lexer and highlighter. As a result, to use it properly requires enabling --shell-escape option on LaTeX compilers (latexmk and pdflatex). Otherwise, it cannot find the pygmentize command. This is a trivial problem if you use LaTeX compilers as standalone programs under a terminal environment. However, if you use an IDE to write LaTeX, this can be quite a hassle. I found a way to configure the VSCode extension LaTeX Workshop so that it can properly compile sources that use the minted package, from a TeX StackExchange post.

Add the following to the VSCode user settings:

"latex-workshop.latex.tools": [
    {
        "name": "latexmk",
        "command": "latexmk",
        "args": [
            "--shell-escape",
            "-synctex=1",
            "-interaction=nonstopmode",
            "-file-line-error",
            "-pdf",
            "-outdir=%OUTDIR%",
            "%DOC%"
        ]
    },
    {
        "name": "pdflatex",
        "command": "pdflatex",
        "args": [
            "--shell-escape",
            "-synctex=1",
            "-interaction=nonstopmode",
            "-file-line-error",
            "%DOC%"
        ]
    },
    {
        "name": "bibtex",
        "command": "bibtex",
        "args": [
            "%DOCFILE%"
        ]
    }
]

This works for VSCode 1.30.2 and LaTeX-Workshop 5.20.1.