All students enrolled in CSE 123 will receive free access to Ed. Ed comes with an online editor that lets you work on your assignment without having to download any software. However, we will still ask that you complete some software setup on your computer since there are a couple of downsides primarily relying on Ed.

  • Ed requires internet access. You cannot work on your assignments on Ed if you don’t have a stable internet connection.
  • Ed does not have a debugger. One of the skills we will be practicing this quarter is how to debug the programs we write. Without a debugger built-in to the software, debugging is much more difficult.

So in addtion to using Ed, we will ask that you install a editor named VSCode (Visual Studio Code) as another option for working on your assignments. VSCode is a fully-featured Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that is used by many professional software developers. The instructions below will explain how to install and set up VSCode for our course.

Install Java

Following the instructions here to install Java on your computer.

Install VSCode

You can get Visual Studio Code (VSCode) from https://code.visualstudio.com/.

Set Up VSCode

We strongly recommend you start by installing our profile file to get the cse12x settings configured automatically. It will enable and disable a number of features and plugins to try and make it a better first IDE experience.

NOTE: Some of these menus look slightly different on macOS vs windows. If you are on macOS you may need to access the menus via clicking on the gear icon on the bottom left.

Something not matching up with what you see? Let us know! Ideally tell us what step specifically doesn’t make sense on your machine, and give us a screenshot.

If you want to change settings later, you are welcome to do so.

Download the CSE13-Java settings

Found here: cse123-Java.code-profile

Macos

You may need to right-click and select “Download Linked File As…” Safari rightclick menu to download file

Alternatively, if you downloaded the file and Safari renamed it to “cse123-Java.code-profile.txt” you can rename it to “cse123-Java.code-profile”. This will not modify the content of the file, just change the name.

Start a new profile

Windows

In the VSCode menus: File->Preferences->Profiles->“Import Profile…” VSCode menu for starting profile import

Macos

In VSCode: Gear icon on the bottom left->Profiles->“Import Profile…”

You may also find this via a menu at the top called “Code”. VSCode menu for starting profile import

Open the file

Select the top option “Select File” (at the top of the screen). VSCode top menu for selecting an import type

Select the file you just downloaded (cse123-Java.code-profile).

Create the profile

Hit the “Create Profile” button on the left. The location of the create profile button on the left of VSCode

Name the profile “cse123-Java” and hit the “Create” button on the top. Name box for giving the new profile a name

Done!

You can double check that it shows “cse123-Java” in the Profiles menu (windows profile menu navigation shown) now.

VSCode menu showing the profile is set to cse123-Java

Running tests

Click on the flask icon on the left.

More instructions here forthcoming.

Accessing the debugger

More instructions here forthcoming.

Starting working on a project

Download the assignment and unzip it. You should now have a folder with “.java” files in it, and possibly a directory called “/libs”

In VSCode: “File->Open Folder” and select the folder containing the .java files.