Getting Started with VSCode IDE

Choose the best IDE, download and configure Visual Studio Code. We’ll use this IDE for the remainder of the course.

Picking an IDE

Before touching any code, decide where you’ll write it. A few options come up constantly in data work:

• Visual Studio Code (VS Code) — free, built by Microsoft, and the most widely used editor in data teams. It opens almost anything (including CSV files and spreadsheets), and integrates directly with Git.
• PyCharm and DataGrip (JetBrains) — solid, especially DataGrip as a dedicated SQL client, but DataGrip requires a paid license.
• Vim — powerful and fully keyboard-driven, but a steep learning curve. Mostly used by developers already comfortable in the terminal.
• Sublime Text and Notepad++ — lightweight text editors. Notepad++ in particular is a good pick if you’re on Windows and want something simple.

This course uses VS Code throughout, so that’s what we’ll set up below.

Setting up VS Code

Once it’s installed, a few changes make it noticeably more usable:

• Switch to a dark theme. Easier on the eyes for long sessions, and it’s the default look in most professional setups.
• Open a folder to start a project. VS Code is built around folders, not single files — open (or create) a folder before you start writing code.
• Browse the Extensions Marketplace and install what you need. At minimum, add the Jupyter extension so you can run notebooks directly in the editor.
• Change the icon theme. File-type icons in the sidebar make it much faster to scan a project and find what you’re looking for.

Are extensions worth it?

Most are optional, but two categories are worth knowing about:

• Cloud integration extensions — let you browse and manage cloud resources (storage, warehouses, etc.) without leaving the editor.
• AI extensions (like a ChatGPT extension) — useful, but note that some require your own API key/access to the underlying model.

We cover AI tooling in the editor in more depth in Getting Started with AI in IDE.

Add VS Code to your PATH

Adding VS Code to your system PATH lets you launch it straight from the terminal (code . opens the current folder). This is worth doing now — later lessons in this module assume you can open a project from the command line. On first try, you may hit a permissions error; if so, it usually just means the install script needs elevated permissions to write the code command somewhere on your PATH.

Next steps

• Continue with Just Enough CLI — now that VS Code can launch from the terminal, it’s the natural next step.
• Come back to Getting Started with AI in IDE later in this module to add an AI assistant on top of this setup.