<aside> ⚠️ Do not use a word processing application, like Microsoft Word or Google Docs to edit code. These are rich-text editors and include their own custom mark-up to style and format the visual appearance.
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While technically, you can use a plain ol’ text editor app, like TextEdit (macOS), many software developers end up using an integrated development environment (IDE) application. IDEs are specifically design applications for writing and testing code and have many tools that improve the development experience.
VS Code dominates the industry as the most popular IDE developers use. This is what we will use for 90% of our coding projects. The other 10% will be handled by specialized IDEs and tools specific to particular system or platform, such as the Arduino.
Arduino’s IDE is optimized for development of Arduino projects and testing coding. There are VS Code plugins that allow you to do the same, but it is worth learning a different IDE, especially one that was designed for a very specific purpose.