From the course: Programming Foundations: Fundamentals

Installing Visual Studio Code on a Mac - Python Tutorial

From the course: Programming Foundations: Fundamentals

Installing Visual Studio Code on a Mac

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- We'll be using Visual Studio Code, or VS Code for short, as our IDE for this course. VS Code is a great cross-platform editor, as it's fast, easy to customize, and has a friendly user interface. To get started, we'll open up the VS Code webpage. I'll be showing you the setup for the Mac operating system in this video. If you're using a Windows machine, please skip to the next video. So the first thing we're going to do is come to code.visualstudio.com. And then we're going to choose the Download for Mac button. Once it's finished downloading, we can double click the zip file to open it up. And in order to use Visual Studio Code, we're going to copy our file over to the applications folder. Now we can go ahead and open up Visual Studio Code. Let's close down the browser. The first thing you see when you come to Visual Studio Code is the welcome screen. From here, you can create a new file, open up a folder, or customize it with extensions. In order to understand a bit more about this particular IDE, we're going to go to the Learn section and click on the interface overview. From here, we can see the various options that are available to us inside VS Code. First, we can explore the various files, search across files, or we can even use things like source code management. Further, we can do launching and debugging as well as manage extensions. For now, this is good enough to get you started. So we're going to hit Exit to leave this overview. Great. In order to work with Python inside of Visual Studio Code, we need to use a Python extension. So the first thing we're going to do is go to Tools and Languages. And then we're going to choose Python. It's the very first option. If we click on this extension, we get tons of information about the various features that it supports. It has things like linting, debugging, or code navigation. Don't worry if you don't understand everything about this right now. It'll become more and more familiar as you continue on your programming journey. For now, let's go ahead and install it by clicking on the Install button. And then once that's complete, we can go ahead and restart Visual Studio Code. So we're going to quit and then open it up again. Now, before we can officially get started working with Python, we need to choose an interpreter. Remember Python is an interpreted language. That means it goes through your code line by line in order to give you some results. To install an interpreter, we can open up the command palette. You can access the command palette using Command Shift P, and then you want to choose Python, Select Interpreter. From here, you have various options available to you. We want to choose the Python three option as this is the very latest version that we've already installed. So I'll just choose the very last one. And that's it. We now have everything we need in order to write and run our code inside of an IDE.

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