Motivation

A good text editor lies at the heart of any serious programmer's toolkit: It can do almost anything and makes you much more productive. The editors built into a specific program are generally are not a satisfying option (we will find certain cases where you may want to use them).

There is a slight learning curve, but soon you hopefully be wondering why no-one forced you to do this before! We should get you past the steepest part of the learning curve during the course itself, so we don't anticipate you struggling on your own.

VS Code

VS Code is a relatively new text editor that works across all three platforms: Linux, Windows and Mac. In a short time it has already become one of most used text editors and we hope you will soon see why. It is built by Microsoft, but is open source, i.e. everyone can see and modify the program's internal code - so it is less nasty on the conscious than some of Microsoft's traditional products. The main advantages for us are that it includes support for debugging, embedded Git control and GitHub, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, and many useful plugins - all of which make our lives much easier.

Installing VS Code on Mac

VS Code can be installed using homebrew. Type the following into your terminal and hit return:

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brew cask install visual-studio-code

Once it has been installed, verify your install by following the instructions below.

Installing VS Code on Ubuntu

VS Code is available to install via snap. Enter the following in your terminal and press Return:

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snap install code --classic

Once it has been installed, verify your install by following the instructions below.

Installing VS Code on Windows

Go to the VS Code download page, and download the User Installer for Windows.

• Once downloaded double click to install.
• Accept any default options.
• At the end of the install, launch VS Code (it gives you this option on the last window).

The first time you launch VS code, you will see the following:

Where it prompts you to install the 'Remote WSL' extension, choose 'Install'.

Once complete, in your Ubuntu terminal type code and press Return. You should see the following (what appears after code .) below:

When the unpacking is complete, VS Code should open.

Verifying Your Install

After you have installed software via the terminal, we often want to verify the install was successful. For most programs we do this by typing the program name followed by --version in to the terminal. Let's do it:

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code --version

which should yield output like:

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2
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1.41.1
26076a4de974ead31f97692a0d32f90d735645c0
x64

if successful.

Installing Extensions for VS Code

VS Code is great straight of the box, but gets even better when we add some additional extensions to make our life easier. To add extensions:

• Open VS Code
• Press Ctrl + Shift + X to open the Extensions side bar (it opens on the left).
• Add extensions by:
• Searching for them in the Marketplace
• When you find them, click Install

We recommend the following extensions to be added for this course:

• Bracket Pair Colorizer 2
• Code Spell Checker
• Git History
• LaTeX Workshop
• Markdown All in One
• Markdown Preview Enhanced
• Project Manager
• Python
• R
• vscode-icons
• vscode-pdf
• Whitespacer