How to start coding and get immediate results

Discover tools for faster coding in this guide from Practicum by Yandex.

When you first start programming and making websites, it’s important to understand how you’re doing. Let’s say you’ve changed an object's parameter. Did you do it correctly? Does it work? Did it turn out awesome or awful?

An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) empowers developers to instantly see the results of their work. An IDE is a piece of software that lets programmers write code, detect errors, and view the outcome.

Technically, you can work without an IDE: just write your code in a text editor, and open your program in special software or a browser. However, this approach is typically slow and requires a lot of extra legwork. It’s better to learn how to use an IDE and write code a hundred times faster.

Choosing an IDE is a matter of personal preference. Some are universal, while others are fine-tuned to specific programming languages. Many IDEs have similar features and let you improve functionality with add-ons. Here are some of the main IDEs that programmers use now. This overview can help you choose the one that’s right for you.

Visual Studio Code

You can download this IDE from the official VS Code website. Despite the fact that VS Code is a Microsoft product, it’s free, open-source, and works across multiple platforms. These advantages, combined with the features of the software, make VS Code one of the most popular IDEs in the world:

VS Code supports almost all existing programming languages, either by itself or through plugins, and formats them accordingly. It also has built-in support for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP: it identifies tag pairs, closed brackets, and command errors.

Here are the most interesting features of VS Code:

Smart autocomplete. VS Code analyzes what command you want to enter and suggests the end of the phrase with prompts and an explanation. This is handy if you forget the order in which variables go or forget the exact wording of a command:

Step-by-step script execution. Sometimes you have to run a script one step at a time, like when you want to understand whether a program loops endlessly. To execute a script step by step, you can use the built-in debugger, a program that examines your code, searches it for bugs, and lets you run it in blocks.

Multiple select and search. To change identical variable values, or to find all identical words or commands, VS Code uses its own processing algorithm. This feature makes it easier for you to edit code and lets you replace functions and variables faster:

Using the multi cursor, you can enter the same value on multiple lines at once:

If you find identical words and commands, you can instantly replace them with new ones.

Code navigation and function descriptions. When you’re writing a big program, it’s easy to forget some things you were doing at the beginning: you might not remember how a function works or what kind of variable needs to go where. When you want to prevent this confusion, VS Code can show you the actual function, a description of the variable, and which parameters are passed in when a command is executed. These features also come in handy when you get code from another developer and have to quickly figure out which code snippets are responsible for what and how they work:

Out-of-the-box VS Code can’t show you immediate results when you’re writing a website. This requires the Live HTML Previewer extension. To install it, go to “Extensions” by clicking the last icon in the left panel or by pressing Ctrl+Shift+X and starting to write “Live HTML Preview” in the search bar.

After installing and launching the extension, you can immediately see how your HTML code and CSS affect the appearance and behavior of your web page. This is especially useful if you’re creating a website from scratch and want to see what’s going on right away.

WebStorm

An IDE for JavaScript by jetBrains. It’s not free, but there is a 30-day free trial. That’s quite enough to figure out whether or not it’s for you:

Auto-suggestion. Some IDEs featuring auto-suggestion are slow and don’t show you all the variable or command options at once, but this isn’t the case with WebStorm. WebStorm’s auto-suggestion feature starts working as soon as you type that first letter and knows when to suggest a variable, command, or service word:

Built-in task runner. This feature is useful when you’re working on multiple projects at once and need to remember what you want to do in each one. This is an out-of-the-box feature and is available for any file:

Error checking. WebStorm can check code for errors and explain each one. It isn’t always perfect, but when it does work, it saves you a lot of time:

To see what happens on a web page right away, you’ll need a plugin called LiveEdit. It’s disabled by default, but you can enable or install it at any time. Once you activate it, select “Update application in Chrome on changes in” to enable data updates in Google Chrome. Now you can write your code and view the outcome on the fly.

Sublime Text 3

A free editor that pesters you to donate money to the developers.

Sublime Text is an incredibly powerful text editor. Its strength lies in its speed: it processes simple web pages just as fast as it processes programs with 100K lines of code. It offers a whole pack of features right out of the box, including syntax highlighting for all possible programming languages, auto-suggestions, and smart tag closing.

Here’s what else the program can do from the get-go:

· Display commands and variables in different colors for popular programming languages.

· Automatically complete commands.

· Select all identical words.

· Collapse code for easier reading.

· Use whatever hotkeys you might need.

· Split a workspace into multiple windows where you can edit the same code.

Another feature that transforms Sublime Text from a simple text editor into a universal solution is its wide range of plugins. Plugins work the same way as in the other IDEs we’ve described, but plugins don’t affect the speed of Sublime Text at all.

When you really start working with Sublime Text, you might begin to think there’s a plugin for everything. You need to edit the same code but in multiple panes? Here you go! Want to quickly write HTML? Sure thing! Need to check your code for errors and bugs? No problem!

· Emmet speeds up coding by replacing standard commands with entire blocks of ready code:

· JavaScript & NodeJS Snippets makes it easier to write code in JavaScript and works via the same principle as Emmet:

· SublimeCodeIntel helps you quickly understand code that has multiple functions. If you click on the name of a function, the plugin immediately shows you that function’s description.

In conclusion, let’s summarize what we’ve learned about these three main IDEs:

If you’re serious about programming, take a better look at Visual Studio Code. It can handle pretty much everything by itself or with plugins, and you don’t need any additional browsers or third-party software.

Want full functionality right after installation? Then try WebStorm — it’s not free, but it’s a powerful IDE.

If speed is your number one priority, then Sublime Text is your best bet. It’s super fast and has plugins for almost anything you can imagine.