Since we are not using an IDE for this course, you will need to choose an editor for use in developing your code. There are a number of choices available. The best ones will offer syntactic highlighting so that you can see the structure of your code. I recommend avoiding editors designed for ordinary text files, particularly on Mac, as they tend to make assumptions about file format that are not helpful.
Cross-Platform Editors
- Visual Studio Code
- This editor works across platforms and is designed to work with multiple types of code. I used it when developing the sample solutions for this course.
- Sublime
- A cross-platform text editor.
- Atom
- Another cross-platform text editor
Platform-Specific Editors
These simple text editors are not recommended, but they have the virtue of coming pre-installed on most systems so they can be used in a pinch.
- Notepad
- A simple text editor that comes pre-installed on Windows
- TextWrangler
- A text editor pre-installed on Mac