Getting Started with Visual Studio Code

Everybody who writes, let it be a story, a piece of code or maybe to take a few notes or something, you need a text editor. This is where VSCode comes in. It can do all a simple note-taking app can do and much more.

With extensions you can extend the functionality of the editor. For example, with Better Fountain extension you can write and format screenplays.

In this article, you’ll learn about installing and basic setup and an overview of some of its features and extensions.

And it is available for all platforms Windows, MacOS and Linux. It is based on the microsoft’s own opensource Code - OSS project which is released under MIT License. VSCode is released under Microsoft product license.

Installation

• You can download the latest version of Visual Studio Code from here.

• For Debian based distributions there is a .deb package available, and .rpm package for RHEL, CentOS , fedora, OpenSUSE etc.

• For Arch-based distributions, there is a community version Code - OSS (also available for other operating systems as VSCodium) without any microsoft customizations or an AUR package for Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code.

• Alternatively you can use snap packages for many linux distributions including Arch-based distros.

• You can refer VSCode wiki for more information about installing on

  • macOS

  • Windows

  • Linux

Basic Setup

You’re here. This means you finished your installation successfully. Yay!

Let’s get you setup now.

You’ll be greeted with a welcome page. You can change VSCode shortcuts to emulate other text editors like Sublime, Vim etc. You can add language support for syntax highlighting and intellisense (autocomplete). There is also a shortcut to change theme. And there is an interactive playground which you can use to familiarize yourself with editing features.

Open command palette by pressing Ctrl + Shift + P and type in ‘Color theme’ and change it to your liking. And you can also change icon theme. You can get new color themes and icon themes from VSCode Marketplace by pressing Ctrl + Shift + X or in the extensions tab to your left.

Suppose you opened a .py file which is a python file. It recommends to you to install python extension to provide syntax highlighting and intellisense.