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The Coder’s Computer: Basic Setup for Programming

picture of man coding Photo by Jefferson Santos on Unsplash

What is a Text Editor?

A text editor is a computer program that allows the user to write plain text. What a person types on the screen is what will show up when published to a web browser. Most operating systems come standard with a text editor. For example, Mac OS has a text editor called TextEdit. While each person may have a preference on which text editor to use, most have the same basic functions.

Types of Text Editors

While a text editor is helpful for typing plain text they are not set up to style your document. Google Docs, Microsoft Word, and pages are examples of popular word processors that allow the user to write and style text. Still, word processors have limitations in what is possible in regards to structure and style. Word processors do not allow the user to write code.

Code Editors, on the other hand, allow the users to write coding languages and see the results published within a web browser. There are many types of code editors. TextEdit, can be used as a standard text editor. More sophisticated applications have features such as autocode which will supply suggestions as the programmer types. Adobe Dreamweaver is an example of a code editor for web development that helps the user organize and manage files. It has various preferences that can be customized such as the ability to place a live version side-by-side the code (either vertically or horizontally). Visual Studio Code is another code editor that has many helpful features such as the ability to add extensions and program with a variety of coding languages. See the following video to learn more about how to set up VS Code.

What is the Command Line?

The command line is a text-based application that sends commands directly to the user’s operating system to run. To open the command line, you must search in the utilities application for terminal. The terminal will open to a command line shell where commands can be entered and executed using the keyboard (not the GUI). A user can search and modify files and folders as well as perform many other commands. Because everything on a person’s computer is a file, there is a path that can be taken to find the file (whether it is a hidden file or not).

Basic Command Line Functions

Here is a list of some of the basic commands:

pwd (print working directory): Explains what director the user currently is in
ls (list files): Lists all of the files in the current directory
cd (change director): Changes the directory that a user specifies
mkdir (make directory): Makes a folder at the specified location
. code: Opens Visual Code Studio

Command Line Resources: