Hello and welcome back.
In this video, I'm going to go through an overview of the code lighted graphical interface.
The IDE stands for Integrated Development, Environment and IDES basically are nice tools that allow
you to compile, edit and run your C programs in a nice, easy manner so you can click on menu options
to compile menu options to build and run.
And they're really, really nice and easy to use.
Now the IDE is kind of a simpler IDE compared to other ides.
If you ever, ever used Xcode or Visual Studio Code or even Eclipse, they're usually a little more
complicated.
This is a lightweight IDE with minimal features and minimal graphical interface components.
So during this video I want to kind of go through this interface to show you some of the nice tips and
tricks and how you can actually use the IDE when you first start code light.
This is the interface that you're going to see.
This is the default interface.
Code light refers to this as the default perspective.
So what we see is basically three areas here that are divided.
We on the left hand side we have and these are usually referred to as panes.
We have this workspace pane.
And then in the middle here we have our editor pane.
This is where we edit our source code.
We also have a recently opened workspaces that comes up by default.
So you can quickly access a previous workspace that you opened or created.
And then at the bottom we have our build and our output window.
So this is our output pane.
Typically the build pane where you see compilation going on and so forth.
So this should look somewhat familiar from previous videos.
We especially know how the workspace pane looks like right now.
It's empty, right?
You see a bunch of tabs inside there.
We're kind of cover those, but we have no workspace.
So let's go out and just open up one of our previous workspaces or create a new one.
And you see a lot of symbols here on the left as well.
You can pretty much get to everything through the menu options at the top, but you can always go to
file new and you can say new workspace or you can pick a previously recent workspace as well.
We know how to create new workspaces from previous videos, but usually you want to select C plus plus,
right?
We can put it wherever we want to in any directory that we like.
By going to the directory structure, we can just name it whatever we want.
Again, we'll just name it Workspace one or Workspace two since we already have one.
And then you say, okay, now you can actually see our workspace two here in our simple view.
And then we can also add a new project by just going to new project, right?
And just naming this project two.
And we can use remember templates from previous videos, all our default information from our project
settings from previous as well.
So we just said, okay, now we have a workspace and a project.
So now we see that it actually created that Main.c file, right?
And then that comes up in the editor view.
And so we have this tree like structure for our workspace projects.
Remember, we can create multiple projects.
We can click on the workspace, we can right click and we can say new new project.
We could also go up to file and select new new project.
We could again create another project just to show you that there can be multiple projects in a single
workspace.
Again, keep all the defaults, say, okay, and now we have multiple projects and it's very important
to know that the bold ones is the active project.
So that will always be the one that builds and compiles.
And any time you do any actions in a project, it's the bold one, the active project that's going to
get actions on.
You can also make another project active by just double clicking it, or you can select it and set it
as active by clicking make active.
Couple of things to note here, especially in the editor.
You can see we have line numbers listed.
Line numbers are always useful because the compiler, whenever there's errors, will tell you the line
number.
And so you can easily reference the line number to fix errors.
It's also a nice way to just see what's going on in terms of when I write code in the class, I can
always refer to line numbers, but not everybody likes the line numbers.
You can always turn off the line numbers by just going to the settings preferences.
And if you go to the editor, you can turn on and off the line numbers.
So right under guides it says line numbers.
You can uncheck display line numbers.
If that's not, if that's your preference.
Another nice preference that you can use.
Again, if you go to Settings preferences and you go to folding, you can actually show the folding
margin and it will actually add a triangle like thing to wherever you have brackets.
And so when you click that, you can see that it basically hides this function.
So it's useful when you have a lot of code and you want to get rid of some different functions.
You don't want to have too much code showing, so you can always add that code.
Code folding for easier editing and kind of just showing these lines.
Another thing to notice in the editor is the syntax highlighting.
You have green for header files, purple for some of the different data types and print f has the green
inside double quotes.
Return is a certain color.
You can always change these.
If you go to settings and you go to colors and fonts and you can start modifying the appearance of the
different syntax highlighting and also the different kind of themes of your code light appearance.
We can have a dark theme and so forth, but you can mess around with this.
I would suggest just leaving these as defaults for the syntax highlighting.
And so if you actually select the customize colors per language, you can select that and you can actually
see the different options for different languages.
So even though we're doing C, you can actually select C plus plus and mess around with different styles
for different keywords in global settings and everything like that.
So it's an option if you want it.
Again, I usually just keep it as the default.
So if we look down below at the output pane, there's a lot of different tabs here, Different windows
that you can see.
Very important ones are the build and the output.
But there are a lot of other ones that you typically don't really need to see.
If you select one of those tabs, you can right click and you can say hide and it will no longer show.
You can also go to the dot, dot, dot on the right hand side and you can kind of see which current
one you're on.
And then also look at the different hidden tabs.
It's a way to manage a bit easier what all these different tabs are showing up again, most of them
you don't really care too much about.
Search and replace is also usually useful to see as well, so you can manage that.
Now up top here, you can slide your window back and down depending on how you want to see it.
There are a lot of different tabs available in the workspace view.
We're really only interested in Workspace Explorer and maybe Tabs.
These other ones.
We don't really use too much tab groups and help so you can get rid of those by selecting one of those
right clicking and saying hide and that will show that it's not showed anymore.
Same with CMake help.
You know, usually hide just again, we're limited on real estate, so we may want to customize according
to your preferences what you want to show and what you don't want to show.
We've seen some of these options already in the workspace view, and we can always go up to view as
well and we can restore layouts.
If you ever mess up or make changes that you don't like and you want to restore the default perspective,
you can also take the workspace view and move it around if you want at the bottom.
So if you just select the title tab here, you can move it down at the bottom.
If you like it at the bottom, if you want it up on the right hand side, we can move it over there
or the bottom right hand side.
And so those are the main things I kind of wanted to show you.
But obviously there are a lot of different options, right?
There's a lot of different shortcuts.
So if you have a tab on the left here, you can create new files, right, by hitting the plus, right?
And usually if you just hover over them, they're highlight open file back, awkward, you know, build
the active project.
So there's shortcuts here on the left that you can have access to.
We already showed you with the wrench goes to the project settings.
This will take you to the active project in the home, right?
You can select the dropdown if you want to build different types of binaries either for release where
you don't have debugging information, you can open up the workspace configuration manager, the Explorer
and the tabs just allow you to navigate.
You can look at different folders here, see different views.
You can always close the workspace.
You can also have a lot of menu options up top and a lot of these are self-explanatory.
Again, creating new projects, creating new empty files, opening existing ones, saving.
Right.
Pretty intuitive, I think.
Editing, copy and pasting, right?
You can turn on different options for matching braces code completion.
Usually you need a plugin for that.
Views pretty pretty good to use because you can hide the different windows that you want for your particular
layouts.
You can show whitespace so you can actually see it in here.
Whitespace is sometimes useful when you're using tabs display end of line.
You can show the navigation bar, the debugger pane that's used for the debugger.
Again, another window usually that will come up automatically when you're in debug view or debugging
a project we'll go through in a lot of these options that we talk about right now, we'll actually go
through as the course progresses.
When I show you things, you can actually change the toolbar to put it on the top.
Right.
And you'd have to reload code light for that.
Whenever you move that around.
The toolbar is nice because it has those shortcuts, right, for for building and even in debug mode
and so forth if if you're showing a debugger window.
So view's a nice thing that you can play around with to again get whatever layout you want.
Search is obviously you can search all your different files.
You see the output in the bottom and search.
You can also do an edit and replace, which is also very useful, especially when you have big projects.
Workspace menu option allows you to again reload open workspaces, create new projects, select the
active project.
Build is your build menu option.
We've already covered this.
How you can basically compile your source code and you can run your source code rebuilding everything,
build and run.
In one particular selection, we can clean a workspace which will delete all intermediate files, all
dot OS, all libraries.
Debugger is the view that you can see when you run your code in debug mode.
And again, we'll talk about this more in a subsequent video.
There's a lot of different plugins you can use for code lite.
Really the only real important ones are usually some for the code completion.
You'd have to do some additional research on this if you wanted to look at any of these different ones.
And then settings is obviously very important because you can actually check your build settings, your
preferences in terms of the editor.
We talked a little bit about this, but you can kind of go through all of these to see how you have
different preferences for different editing, preferences, colors and fonts.
And then the build settings was always important because you can select your build and have all your
paths.
Again, we've kind of talked about that already.
And then help is basically how you can get updates, run the setup wizard and so forth.
So a lot of different options in this IDE, mainly just personal preference type operations and also
shortcuts to common features that you usually perform like building and compiling.
And again, as I mentioned in upcoming videos, we'll go through some of these a little bit more in
detail when we need to use them.
Right now, the basic default perspective is usually meets everyone's needs and you can manage your
different projects in your workspaces.
You have your editor and you have your output windows for building compiling.
Thank you.