Editors and VS Code

Any text editor can edit C code

At the most basic level, C source files are plain text files. Any text editor can open and modify them.

That said, a programming project quickly becomes easier to manage with an IDE or a code editor designed for development.

What an IDE gives you beyond text editing

Compared with a basic text editor, a practical IDE or programming editor usually adds:

  • syntax highlighting for C files
  • error and warning display while you type
  • jump to definition and symbol search
  • project-wide search across files
  • integrated terminal access
  • Git integration for commits, diffs, and branch state
  • tasks or shortcuts to build and run the project

These features do not write the project for you. They help you inspect, understand, and manage your own work more efficiently.

Recommendation: use VS Code

We recommend Visual Studio Code for this project.

Open the repository in folder mode, not as isolated files. This lets VS Code understand the project structure, search the whole codebase, and apply workspace settings and recommended extensions.

When VS Code suggests recommended extensions for the workspace, install them. They improve C editing, diagnostics, and project navigation.

Use VS Code as the main workstation

VS Code is not only an editor window. It can be the main place where you:

  • edit files in src/
  • inspect compiler errors
  • open a terminal
  • run the onboarding script
  • compile the project
  • run ./build/freud.exe

That makes the edit-build-run loop much faster.

Integrated terminal

VS Code includes a terminal panel. Use it to run commands such as:

./validconfig.sh
cmake -B build
cmake --build build
./build/freud.exe -f images/input/test.jpg -c color_blue

Keeping the terminal inside the editor is practical because you can move directly from an error message to the corresponding source file.

VS Code run configuration

To avoid retyping the command every time, update cmake.debugConfig.args in .vscode/settings.json with your target image path and command. The VS Code Run button will then use those arguments directly.

About AI-first coding tools

Do not use AI-first coding environments or code-generation tools for this project.

That includes tools whose main promise is to generate or rewrite code for you. The issue is not the brand name. The issue is the behavior: if the tool is producing the code you are supposed to learn to write, it is not appropriate here.

See Ethics.