Getting a Text Editor Set Up

Before we start learn­ing to write code, we need to have a place to write. We write code within soft­ware ap­pli­ca­tions of­ten called “Text Editors”. If you've ever writ­ten an es­say for school be­fore, you've used a text ed­i­tor. Whereas those kinds of ed­i­tors are built for writ­ing text, there are other text ed­i­tors out there that are de­signed strictly for writ­ing code.

As you be­come more ad­vanced, you'll find what fea­tures in text ed­i­tors you find most use­ful. In ad­di­tion, there are even text ed­i­tors and “Integrated Development Environments”, or IDEs, which are de­signed with spe­cific kinds of code-writ­ing. These are all things you shouldn't have to worry about right now, but its use­ful to see the road ahead!

To get you started, we have two rec­om­mended text ed­i­tors you can use for free. It's worth not­ing that we're not spon­sored in any way to pro­mote ei­ther of these op­tions. In ad­di­tion, both of these text ed­i­tors also have paid op­tions, but it's not nec­es­sary to down­load and start us­ing them.

Visual Studio Code

It's hard to over­state how much Visual Studio Code, or VS Code for short, has be­come the stan­dard text ed­i­tor for the soft­ware de­vel­op­ment in­dus­try. Built by Microsoft, this app is a spir­i­tual sib­ling to “Visual Studio”, which is an en­ter­prise level IDE for var­i­ous Microsoft built pro­gram­ming lan­guages.

It's pos­si­ble that you could start with VS Code, and never switch your Text Editor. It's highly ex­tend­able, with a mar­ket­place of plu­g­ins and lots of cus­tomiza­tion op­tions.

You can down­load VS Code here

Sublime Text 4

If VS Code is the Goliath of the in­dus­try, Sublime Text is closer to a David. Sublime Text is writ­ten and main­tained by a far smaller team, and is a very light­weight ap­pli­ca­tion. However, with that lack of heft comes speed and ease of use, along with tons of func­tion­al­ity. Admittedly, Sublime Text was more of a stan­dard a few years ago than it is now.

In ad­di­tion, it doesn't have a true free ver­sion. Instead, you can down­load the main ap­pli­ca­tion, and sim­ply never “register” when prompted. If this doesn't both you, and feel like try­ing out some­thing a bit dif­fer­ent, give Sublime Text a shot!

You can down­load Sublime Text 4 here

Other Options

Text Editors end up be­ing a fairly per­sonal choice for soft­ware de­vel­op­ers. There are many peo­ple out there with strong opin­ions about how their reg­u­lar ap­pli­ca­tion and setup is the best. Just know that most of the fea­tures that are listed on lists of pro's and con's re­ally mi­nor for those just start­ing out. If you're cu­ri­ous about ex­plor­ing other op­tions, keep in mind that some of the fea­tures of more ad­vanced ap­pli­ca­tions might get in the way of your per­sonal de­vel­op­ment. Sometimes less is more.

If you're still not dis­suaded though, there are lots of op­tions out there. JetBrains makes a whole suite of IDEs for en­gi­neers. Of these, WebStorm is the IDE for Web Development (and the per­sonal choice of the au­thor, though not one they'd rec­om­mend to new­com­ers 😅). There's also Notepad++, a sim­i­lar light­weight ex­pe­ri­ence to Sublime Text. And then there's non-GUI based text ed­i­tors like VIM, which while beloved by many, have a huge learn­ing curve to pick up for new­com­ers.

If that's all a lot to take in...

If read­ing all of that makes you feel par­a­lyzed by op­tion, we can make it sim­ple for you; just in­stall VS Code. It's tried and true.

Next up, we'll talk about how we'll be us­ing web browsers to ac­tu­ally view the out­put of your code!