IDE (Integrated Development Environment)

IDEs solve the problem of providing a place that understands and can help correct your code, add libraries to it, and if necessary ‘build’ and or ‘run’ it. These come in different flavours.

Github Code Editor

If your code is already in github and you would liek to use an online cloud basde version of visual studio code you can press

press shift and > on your keyboard

Enhanced Text editor

In the first iterations of the course we used notepad++, it works for python and most opther langauages but is limited.

Full integrated Development Environment

These can be lanuage specific - for instance Spyder for Python or Eclipse for Java. Recently in this course we have been using Visual Studio Code which supports multiple languages.

List of most popular IDEs

Course future

We are aware that other courses especially the introduction to programming course teach Spyder, so we will not make a specific IDE mandatory but Visual Studio Code is recommended. We are currently moving the examples in the course to VS code to reflect this. In the future maybe the Python scripting environment in Blender could act as an IDE?