Tools & Workflows

Choosing an editor and learning the tools around the code.

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Choosing an editor or IDE

There is no universally best editor. If a course specifies one, begin there. Otherwise, choose the tool that fits the language and the amount of guidance you want.

Visual Studio Code

A flexible, relatively lightweight editor with extensions for most languages. A sensible general-purpose choice when you do not need a language-specific IDE.

Editor Free General purpose

JetBrains IDEs

Full-featured, language-focused environments such as IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm. They provide excellent navigation and refactoring, though the interface can feel substantial to a newcomer.

IDE family Free and paid

Xcode

Apple’s development environment for Swift, SwiftUI, and apps for Apple platforms.

IDE Free Apple platforms

Positron and RStudio

Positron is a modern environment for Python and R data science. RStudio remains a mature, focused choice for R and established R-based workflows.

IDEs Free Data science

Visual Studio and Eclipse

Visual Studio is a comprehensive environment for .NET and C++ development, especially on Windows. Eclipse is a long-established open-source IDE commonly associated with Java.

IDEs Free options

Workflows worth learning

The Missing Semester of Your CS Education

MIT course material on the shell, command-line tools, Git, debugging, profiling, and practical skills that traditional courses often leave implicit.

Course Free

Happy Git and GitHub for the useR — Jenny Bryan and contributors

A friendly guide to installing Git, connecting it with GitHub, and using both in an R-oriented workflow.

Book Free

Quarto: Get Started

Official tutorials for creating reproducible documents, presentations, websites, and other publications with Quarto.

Tutorial Free