Visual Studio Code

In many of your classes, an indispensable tool will be your code editor: a text editor specifically designed for editing programming code. While you are welcome to use whatever code editor works best for you, Visual Studio Code (or “VS Code”) is a popular option because it is fairly beginner-friendly, but still a very powerful tool once you familiarize itself with all its bells and whistles.

Most notably, it is well suited for a variety of programming languages, which means that, if you become fluent in using VS Code with Python, and then need to edit some C or Java code, you won’t have to learn how to use a new editor from scratch.

Additionally, it makes it fairly easy to connect to a remote server via SSH, which means you can run VS Code on your personal computer to edit files that live in the CS Linux servers, as well as interact with those files from a terminal built into VSCode (e.g., to run your code).

Finally, VS Code is free! You won’t have to pay anything to use it.

In this section, we provide instructions on how to install VS Code, how to set up some common configuration options, and how to set up VS Code to connect to the CS Linux servers with SSH.