Hi,
Yes, the settings on the “General, Scroll Bars and Tabs” pages do not get synchronized automatically due to the internal architecture of the VS language services. However all the advanced code formatting settings (from the Formatting pages) should get synchronized properly.
Regarding Makefile, the EXTERNAL_LIBS variable is meant to be automatically updated by VisualGDB based on the referenced projects. If you want to manually add libraries that are not otherwise references, please use the ADDITIONAL_LINKER_INPUTS variable.