The middle panel is where you edit the code you have written or need to fix you can open and edit several different files side-by-side. In this case, I’m editing a file called “style.css.' In the top left panel, you can see the different variations of code you are editing. This is what Visual Studio Code’s home screen looks like when you write your first line of code or open a file that you have already created: It’s a recent entrant to the market Microsoft released the product as a public preview at the end of 2015, posting the open source code to Github, before making it available as a general release in April 2016.ĭespite its newbie status, Visual Studio Code has rapidly gained popularity among developers, ranking as the most popular development environment overall in Stack Overflow’s 2018 Developer Survey. Visual Studio (the text editor is known as Visual Studio Code so we’ll refer to that from now on) is Microsoft’s free text editor that runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS. In this article, I'll provide an in-depth comparison of two of the most popular text editors: Visual Studio and Sublime Text. This is crucial as there is no “best” text editor out there, only the one that you allows you to create your best work. I’ve dabbled with a few text editors to get a better feel for what suits my needs best. For example, if you decide to attend a Meetup or in-person coding course, they will use a downloadable text editor, and you’ll need to install this to work on projects both in class and at home. While Codecademy’s learning environment provides an intuitive and user-friending coding experience, sometimes you’ll need to use your own text editor. Below is the Codecademy text editor in full screen at the end of the first module of the HTML course. You’ll already be familiar with a text editor if you’ve taken any Codecademy courses.

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