Visual Studio Code Install
I mentioned in my previous post that I have been going through the curriculum of The Odin Project. While I could use Xcode as my code editor while working through the curriculum, their recommended code editor is Visual Studio Code. VS Code is a very popular code editor from Microsoft that has many great features and outstanding add-on support. It is “built on open source”, meaning that the binaries distributed by Microsoft are licensed and contain some proprietary code, but most of the code base is from an open source repository. Check out the below link for more info on the differences between the Code — OSS repo and Visual Studio Code.
Building VS Code from source is my preferred option and will likely be a future post, but for now I settled on using the Microsoft distributed binaries.
Since my MacBook has a M1 chip, I choose the Apple Silicon download.
To verify the integrity of the .zip file, I verified its checksum with the checksums provided on the Visual Studio Code downloads page.
Once the checksum was verified, I extracted the contents of the .zip file and moved the .app file to the Applications directory.
With VS Code now in Applications, I opened the app. When first opening, there is a text line at the bottom of the app advising the VS Code collects usage data. I clicked the ‘opt out’ link and turned off all telemetry.
Opening VS Code from the command line can be super helpful, so I added the code command to the $PATH variable in my .bash_profile file.
To verify I could use the code command, I closed my current terminal and opened a new one to test the code command. I also added VS Code to my dock.
With VS Code installed, I could now more easily follow along with The Odin Project curriculum.
What is your favorite code editor to use? Is using an open source code editor important to you? Let me know by responding to this post, or you can email me at cypherbean@protonmail.com.
