Having set up C, you can run C programs from your PC. But a question remains, where to write a program. You can write the programs in notepad also, but doing so you will miss out on some key features of a text editor like
- Syntax Highlighting
- Auto-Completion
- Code Hints
and many more.
There are many text editors and IDEs available for the job like VS Code, Atom, Sublime Text, DevC++, CodeBlocks, etc
But I will not bound you to some specific piece of software. As developers, you should explore, and try everything before you could settle on one software that best suits you according to your needs.
But I would like to highlight some points of using VS Code.
- Syntax Highlighting
- Auto-Completion
- Suggestion Code Snippets
- Extensions, is what make VS code the most popular text editor. It has many extensions available in the store, using which you can ease out your code writing experience and reduces effort.
- Built In debugger is also one of the awesome features that distinguishes VS Code from other text editors as it is the only lightweight editor which provides a debugger, otherwise, they come built-in with IDEs(Integrated Development Environments) which are much heavier in size.
I prefer VS code, but as mentioned earlier, you should not bound yourself to a certain piece of software, rather you should try the best possible options and fix the IDE or text editor that best suits you.
Some extensions that I recommend installing in VS Code:
Code Runner by Jun Han. It will help you to run the code with a single click
C/C++ extension by Microsoft. It will give you suggestions for syntax, autocompletion, and many more features that will improve your coding experience
Links for Downloading:
But I would like to highlight a point, that while you'd be giving interviews, either on campus or off-campus, probabilities are high that you would not be given an editor that has auto-completion or syntax highlighting features. You'd be given a simple notepad, where you have to write the code all by yourself and then run the program through the command line/terminal. Thus you must be very accustomed to using terminals and learning how to run programs through a terminal or pass command line arguments(topics which I will surely cover in the later stages). Also, avoid being too dependent on the features I discussed above(Syntax Highlighting, auto-completion, click to run).