Overview

It is recommended to use an integrated development environment (IDE). Common IDEs used by Autonomy are Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code (VS Code, not to be confused with Visual Studio (VS) (without Code)) and JetBrains’s Pycharm.

IDE features

Basic text editors typically have the following features:

• User interface

• Backspace

• Text selection

• Copying and pasting

• Undo and redo

• Find and replace

More advanced text editors have additional features:

• On selection, highlighting other locations of the same text

• Tab autocompletion of words/phrases that are already present

• Basic code syntax highlighting

• Markdown formatting (e.g. *Hello* becomes Hello )

• Find and replace supporting regular expressions

• Extensions

IDEs are editors that are designed specifically for code development. Typical features of an IDE include:

• User interface for typical commands (e.g. single click compiling)

• Code syntax highlighting

• Code error and warning indication

• Type hinting (i.e. telling you what type a variable is far away from declaration)

• Tab autocompletion of code

• Rename refactoring (e.g. renaming a variable or a function which automatically renames all instances where it is used)

• Integrated compiler

• Integrated test suite

• Integrated debugger

• Integrated terminal

• Integrated version control

Visual Studio Code

https://code.visualstudio.com/

Extensions

These are suggestions only, and are not exhaustive.

Git:

• GitLens by GitKraken

• Git Tree Compare by Maik Riechert

Python

• Python extension pack by Microsoft

• Pylint by Microsoft

• Black Formatter by Microsoft

Dart:

• Dart by Dart Code

• Flutter by Dart Code

Pycharm

TODO