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VS Code

Another cross-platform, general purpose editor with Julia support is VS Code

Extensions, User Settings, and the Command Pallete

Command Palette: Many features in VS Code are found through the Command Palette which can be accessed with Ctrl+Shift+P. Throughout, these notes on OSX the Ctrl is the ⌘ button. See https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/userinterface for more on the VS Code UI.

Extensions: Go to the Extensions tab by clicking on the left side of VS Code, or Ctrl+Shift+X. To find an extenion, type in part of the name into Search Extensions in Marketplace. Alternatively, you can directly click "Install" button on the web links in the VS Code Marketplace

User Settings: To edit Settings in VS Code, open up the user settings with Ctrl+, or opening up the command palette and starting to type User Settings.To find a particular settings, start typing in the name of the setting, extension, etc. Once you find it, you can select the Edit icon next to a particular setting to copy it to your local settings, and change it.

General Setup

  1. Install VS Code
  2. Optional: Install Markdown All in One
    • Not required, but a good idea since Markdown is pervasive
    • For TOC compatability with github, go to the User Settings with Ctrl+, and then set "markdown.extension.toc.githubCompatibility": true
    • To have it show a preview immediately when you open one of the files, set "markdown.extension.preview.autoShowPreviewToSide": true
  3. Optional: It is convenient to globally change the word wrap, so choose Ctrl+, and then set `"editor.wordWrap": "on",
  4. Optional: Install the GitLens extension.

Setup for Julia

  1. Ensure that VS Code and Julia are installed
  2. Type in julia to find and install Julia Language Support
  3. To test the installation:
    • Create a new File called test.jl or something similar, and copy in something like
    f(x) = x
f(2)
    • In the file, go F5 to run the file. The first time you do this, it is likely that this will take time so be a little patient. On the bottom, it may say something like "Language Server Busy"
    • If it shows something in the bottom "TERMINAL" like the following, then it is working
    Main> f(x) = x
f (generic function with 1 method)
Main> f(2)
2
  4. Optional: If the above doesn't work, then you may need to manually set your Julia executable.
    • First, find the location of the julia binary. The easiest way to do this is to open a separate Julia REPL and type JULIA_HOME to get something like C:\\Users\\jlperla\\AppData\\Local\\Julia-0.6.3\\bin
    • From this location, the file is something like C:\\Users\\jlperla\\AppData\\Local\\Julia-0.6.3\\bin\\julia.exe on Windows or something equivalent on other OSs. For Windows, make sure to double every backlash
    • To set this in VS Code, open up the user settings by opening up the command palette > Preferences: User Settings
    • In here, type julia to get the julia specific settings
    • Then click on the "julia.executablePath" in the "Default User Settings" and choose "Edit" to "Copy to Settings"
    • This copies it over, and you can put in the path. For example, "julia.executablePath": "C:\\Users\\jlperla\\AppData\\Local\\Julia-0.6.3\\bin\\julia.exe" where the quotes are important.
  5. Play around with executing Julia code
    • You can execute a single line with Ctrl+Enter, which is a great way to go line by line through the code
    • Execute the whole file with F5
    • To see the plotting pane, ensure you have Plots.jl installed (i.e. Pkg.add("Plots")) and then copy the following into a test file
    using Plots
plot(1:5, 1:5)
    • Execute the code (noting that using Plots the first plot will take 20-30 seconds after precompilation) and it should show the Plot Pane
  6. Optional, but strongly encouraged: Setup the Revise.jl workflow described in Julia Notes. To summarize,
    • Find the . files are for your account. For example, it is usually at cd ~ on linux/osx/windows with bash, or in a directory such as C:\Users\jlperla
    • Copy .juliarc.jl to that directory or add the contents of that file if required.

Github Integration

  • If you are working on a cloned repository, you can see changes in the Source Control tab, or with Ctrl+Shift+G.
  • This will show you changes to the files, etc. It will let you Commit with a message as well.
  • The left hand side of the bottom bar on VS Code (or the Git repository in this tab) will let you Pull/Push/Sync
  • A simple Tutorial with more detail in Using Version Control in VS Code

Setup for Latex

  1. If you just did the Julia setup, perhaps restart so you don't have the same windows cluttered.
  2. Optional: While TeXLive already has it, if you have installed MikTex on Windows, you will need to manually setup SyncTex:
    • Download kpathsea630.dll
    • Download synctex.exe
    • And place both of them in the miktex binaries folder, e.g. C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.9\miktex\bin\x64
  3. Install the following packages in VS Code (clicking on them or using Ctrl+Shift+X to get the extensions)
  1. At this point, you should be able to open a test latex file. Create a test.tex file with something like
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
TEST
\end{document}
  1. Then go Ctrl+Alt+B to build the file then Ctrl+Alt+V to get the PDF preview.
  2. If you make a change in the latex (e.g. change to TESTS) and save, if should automatically update the PDF.
  3. Optional: Many latex packages require a compilation settings with shell access.
    • To do this, open up the user settings, Ctrl+, and start searching for latex-workshop.latex.magic.args
    • Copy it to the USER SETTINGS and modify, adding in a "-shell-escape", line. It should look something like,
    "latex-workshop.latex.magic.args": [
        "-synctex=1",
        "-interaction=nonstopmode",
        "-shell-escape",
        "-file-line-error",
        "%DOC%"
    ]
    • These settings are used whenever the magic comments are used in the latex file, e.g.
    % !TEX program = pdflatex
% !BIB program = bibtex
  4. Optional: For less irritating error messages, change to "latex-workshop.message.error.show": false and "latex-workshop.message.warning.show": false

Snippets

Project-Specific

Sometimes your project will have boilerplate code (like tests) that you need to use repeatedly. VSCode provides a nice syntax for creating and using these.

  1. Download the Project Snippets extension and install it.
  2. In your project folder (the same one with the .git directory), create a folder ./vscode/snippets.
  3. Inside that folder, create a JSON file for every language you need custom snippets for (say, julia.json). The language names should be in lowercase.
  4. From there, you can use the following syntax (explained below).
{
  "SnippetA": {
      "prefix": "blahblahblah",
      "body": [
        "for (const ${2:element} of ${1:array}) {",
        "",
        "}"
      ],
      "description": "For Loop"
  }
}

This defines a snippet, SnippetA. You access it by typing blahblahblah into the VSCode editor (or accessing the snippets menu with Ctrl + Space. From there, the boilerplate code will appear. The ${1:xyz} has two pieces. The number governs where your keystrokes will fill first (so in this example, what I start typing immediately after loading the snippet will fill that spot, then if I hit tab, what I type next will fill the second spot, and so on). Lines should be separated by ,s. The words array and element govern what appear in those spots before I start filling them in.

To create multiple snippets, simply place a , after the first one (i.e., after the second-to-last }, and repeat the code for the first one. It should have a different snippet ID (what we have as SnippetA).

Project-Independent

Sometimes, you'll have snippets which you want to use for a language in general, regardless of what project you're working on.

To work on these, click Preferences -> User Snippets, select the appropriate snippets file, and repeat the same procedure as above.

Sharing Snippets

To share snippets, just copy and paste your {language}.json file to somebody.

Other Links and Material

  • Settings Sync is an extension to maintain settings between different computers. A little complicated to setup
  • https://github.com/formulahendry/vscode-code-runner is another package... not sure it is useful for Julia or Python
  • In the menu, go to Help/Interactive Playground to see features such as Multi-Cursor Editing, etc.
  • Lots of places in VSCode, you're asked to describe things in a format called JSON (snippets, preferences, etc.) If this format is unfamiliar to you, this site provides a friendly tutorial.