Visual Studio Code

Ok, you have survived, so far.

Let’s take a minute to contemplate that you probably have no idea on what you’ve been doing so far. The good thing is that from here on it only tends to get better.

And, jokes aside, we can promise that by the end of the course you’ll be entirely familiar with all of these concepts and you’ll look back and see how simple all these steps are.

---

IDE

To write software we like to use a nice IDE (Integrated Development Environment). It's a tool used to write code and manage files, and it comes with a set of powerful features.

We suggest you use Visual Studio Code, often referred to as VS Code. This popular IDE was created by Microsoft and is free to use.

You’ll grow to love it, we promise.

Installation

On macOS:

1. You can download VS Code from this link, and install it as you would do with any other application. Let us know if you need support with that.

On Ubuntu:

1. In your menu, click on Ubuntu Software.
2. Search for VS Code and install it. Let us know if you need any support.

For macOS Users Only: Configuring VS Code to launch from the Command Line

You can run VS Code by clicking on its icon. These steps will configure VS Code so that you can also run it by entering a simple command in the terminal. It's a handy tool to have, as you'll see!

Ubuntu installs of VS Code come with this feature already set up, so there's no need to perform these steps if you're using Ubuntu.

1. Open VS Code.
2. Open the Command Palette: Cmd+Shift+P.
3. Type shell command.
4. Click on the one that states: Shell Command: Install ‘code’ command in PATH.
5. Restart your terminal.

For both macOS and Ubuntu users:

To open a file in VS Code directly from the terminal, all you need to do is type code, followed by the name of the file:

1. code fileName

Or, if you want to open the whole project:

1. code .

(Yes, the "." was on purpose. You’ll learn about it in the next module about the Command Line Interface section.)