Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:

• Explain the purpose of a text editor
• Install a browser and text editor
• Understand how to open files in a text editor and browser

Using a text editor

When writing code, it is easiest to do so inside of a Text Editor. We can't use tools like Microsoft Word or Google Docs to write code, we need a different kind of program. There are quite a few text editors out there, but for this course we will be installing VS Code. You can find instructions to install it here.

You may also come accross the term IDE when learning more about text editors. For developers of many languages, standard practice dictates the use of an IDE (Integrated Development Environment). IDEs are generally heavyweight, fully-featured code editors that include things like build/compiler setup, debuggers, code analysis tools, and more. Examples of IDEs include Eclipse, Visual Studio, and XCode.

By contrast, web developers have traditionally utilized text editors, which are very lightweight by comparison and have historically not shipped with many features. There exist IDEs for web dev (the most popular of which is probably WebStorm by JetBrains), but text editors such as Notepad++, Vim, Emacs, Sublime Text, and VS Code are still dominant.

Installing a browser

Since we will be building applications for the web, we need a web browser to view our code! For this course we will be using Google Chrome. You can find instructions to install it here

Opening Files in a Text Editor

To open files in our Text Editor we can head to File > Open or drag the file to the VS Code icon in the dock (on a Mac)

Opening HTML files in the browser

To see what our HTML looks like in the browser, we can open .html files by double clicking on the file in finder or dragging the the file to the browser icon in the dock (on a Mac).