Visual Studio Code is an open source, cross platform code editor with a vast library of extensions and integrations. If you are not religious about another editor, I would push you to give this one a try.

This is a brief tutorial to help Mac users get Visual Studio Code installed on their MacBook entirely from the terminal. Seriously, just never use a mouse.

Install Homebrew

Homebrew is a command line tool for installing software on your Apple or Linux system. These days, I install almost everything through the command line and you should too!

To open the terminal, simply press command + space and search for “terminal”. Once it is open, run the following command to install Homebrew.

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

You will be prompted for your password a few times, so just be ready to enter it. The whole process takes less than 10 minutes. Don’t miss this little part at the end where it gives you some commands to run to add Homebrew to your PATH. If you don’t do this, you will not be able to run the brew command from the terminal.

Install Visual Studio Code

Once Homebrew is installed, the rest is simple. Just run the following commands to ensure Homebrew is up-to-date, that you have the latest Homebrew Cask, and that you have the code editor installed.

brew update
brew tap homebrew/cask
brew install visual-studio-code

Start Coding

Because the Homebrew installation automatically adds VS Code to your PATH, all you have to do going forward is open the terminal and type the code command.

If you are really loving this not mouse clicking stuff, you can also just navigate to the folder where the code is that you want to work on using the cd command and type code .. This tells VS Code that you not only want to open the editor, but you want to work on the files in the current working directory.

Happy coding everyone.