Visual Studio Code Installation

In the Digital Humanities Lab, we'll be using the Visual Studio Code IDE made by Microsoft. An IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a tool that allows you to write, run, and debug code all in one place. By standardizing the IDE across the lab, we hope to facilitate collaboration and standardize support.

VS Code is pretty popular these days, so if you haven't used it before, it's a good chance to learn a tool you might end up using elsewhere (internships, jobs, etc.).

Installation

Go to the VS Code website, download the appropriate installer, and install VS Code.

Note that on macOS, there's no installer: it just unzips a .app bundle. Drag this into your "Applications" folder.

Install the Python extension for VS Code from the VS Code Marketplace.

Intro Stuff

If you've never used VS Code before it's worth watching some of their intro videos or skimming the user guide.

This will save you a lot of flailing around and show you how to do things quickly. You are going to spend a lot of time in a code editor, so it's worth investing a little energy in learning how yours works and how to set it up the way you like it.

Okay, but do all that later

We need to install a few other tools before we use VS Code, so close it up and move along to the next section of this guide. You can mess with your keyboard shortcuts and color scheme later, too.

← Intro git →