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DAE give up on a fancy editor and go back to a plain one?
Three months back I downloaded VS Code since every beginner guide says to use it. I messed with themes and extensions and a dozen settings for 2 weeks and barely wrote any code.
Last Friday I switched to just plain Notepad and a terminal on my laptop in the kitchen. I finally finished 4 small practice scripts over the weekend. The fancy editor looked cool but I kept fiddling instead of coding.
Now I am second guessing it though. Am I hurting myself by skipping the debugger and the helpful error hints? Anyone here stuck with a plain editor as a beginner and still turned out okay?
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williams.drew1d ago
The part about "I kept fiddling instead of coding" is the whole thing right there. I read a blog post a while back from a guy who taught himself to code on a Chromebook with some bare bones text editor, and he said the tooling rabbit hole is where most beginners lose months. His point was that the debugger and error hints are great later, but early on you learn more by reading the error message yourself and googling it. I did pretty much what you did, started on Notepad, and yeah the errors were annoying at first, but I actually learned what the messages meant because I had to sit with them. You can always add the fancy editor back once you have a habit going. Four finished scripts beats two weeks of theme shopping every time.
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