An introduction to IDEs and VS Code

The console is great for running a line or two of code or for quickly checking whether an idea will work, but it cannot save our code, and we can’t edit it. We need an editor. The simplest editor is whichever text editor we have installed on our machine, for instance, Notepad on Windows or Vi on Linux. These will do the bare minimum in that we can write our code, save it, and come back and edit it. They won’t do any more than that, though, and there are much better options available.

An IDE will highlight commands and keywords and do some syntax checking, and the good ones will also come with a built-in console to allow us to test our code by running short sections of it, sometimes just a line or the whole thing at once. They also usually have some sort of debugging facility, allowing us to stop our code at certain points and check the contents of variables. Most languages come with some form of IDE, for instance, Python has IDLE...