Visual Studio Code
What is Visual Studio Code?
Visual Studio Code, often referred to as “VS Code”, is a software tool for writing, editing, and developing text-based documents and programs. At IPA, we use a variety of tools for editing documents and writing code. However, we recommend using VS Code as a standard ecosystem for working on collaborative code-first data and technology projects. You may be more comfortable working with other tools like Stata Do File Editor, RStudio for R, or Jupyter Notebooks. We encourage you to work with the tools that you are most comfortable with. However, VS Code provides a common ecosystem for source-controlled, collaborative, polyglot development of data and technology solutions. We encourage IPA teams to contribute to this documentation in order to share best practices and useful settings or extensions.
How to Install VS Code?
To install VS Code, download and install the latest software version from the Visual Studio Code website or run the following from the command line if you have the Windows Package Manager, winget, installed:
| Platform | Commands |
|---|---|
| Windows | winget install Microsoft.VisualStudioCode |
| MacOS | brew install --cask visual-studio-code |
| Linux | sudo snap install code --classic |
Using VS Code
The best starting point for familiarizing yourself with VS Code is the documentation.
Some particularly helpful references in the documentation are:
Recommended Extensions
The core software and functionality in VS Code gives you a lot of useful tools for writing, editing, and collaborating. Additionally, you can add functionality through Extensions.
Some helpful extensions are the following:
- Python Extension - language syntax for Python programming
- Ruff - Python linting and code formatting
- R Extension - Interacting with R from VS Code
- GitHub Pull Requests - review and manage GitHub pull requests and issues in Visual Studio Code
- Jupyter Extension - for developing with jupyter notebooks
- Just - support for Justfiles
- Quarto Extension - support for writing and building Quarto projects
- Markdown All in One - support for Markdown
- Markdown Preview Mermaid Support - support for Mermaid diagrams in Markdown
- Conventional Commits - support for writing easy to understand commit messages