VS Code
Visual Studio Code is the most popular code editor among web developers. It's free, powerful, and highly customizable.
Let's set it up and learn the essential features that will make your coding experience smooth and efficient.
🛠️ You'll write a lot of code
As a developer, you'll spend most of your time editing text files that contain code. People have been doing this for decades, so the tools for it have become incredibly powerful.
These tools are called code editors. If you're already comfortable with one, stick with it. But if web development is new to you, I strongly recommend starting with Visual Studio Code (VS Code).
It's free, fast, and used by the vast majority of web developers. It's what you'll see in 90% of tutorials online, and it just works.
The interface looks like this:
This is how my VS Code looks as I'm writing this lesson!
⚙️ Let's set it up
Installing VS Code takes just a few minutes. Here's what you need to do:
Download VS Code from code.visualstudio.com and install it on your machine.
Open VS Code. Go to File → Open Folder and select the first-website folder you created in the previous lesson.
(⚠️ Always open a folder, not just a file — this is important!)
Click on index.html in the file explorer on the left. Try editing the text, save with Cmd/Ctrl + S, and refresh your browser to see the changes. 🎉