# Getting Started with an IDE

An IDE, an Integrated Deelopment Environment, is a type of text editor specifically
for programming. There are two that you can use in our courses:

* We recommend [Visual Studio Code](https://code.visualstudio.com/download).
  It's a general editor useful for many languages and text editing tasks. 
* You can also use Pycharm. It is a professional IDE, with a lot more features
  than Visual Studio Code but it is also more complicated. 

## Download and Install an Editor

Download Visual Studio Code from [this download page. ](https://code.visualstudio.com/download)
Download the PyCharm Community Edition from the [bottom half of this page](https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/download/?section=mac)

## Download and install Git

To do local development, you will need to have the source code management program Git installed. 

* [Git for Windows](https://git-scm.com/download/win)
* [Git for Mac OS X](https://git-scm.com/download/mac)

For Mac, you will also need to [install homebrew](https://brew.sh)

## Download and Install Python 

Of course, to program in Python, you must have Python installed. 

* For Mac, you can install python with homebrew ( run `brew install python` )
* For Mac and Windows, you can use the [Official Python Distribution](https://www.python.org/downloads/)

## Fork your Repo

Go to the repository page, such as the repo for [Python Level 1](https://github.com/league-curriculum/Python-Level-1), and click on the
 <img class="inline" src="https://images.jointheleague.org/github/fork.png" >  button. When you are done, 
 you will have a copy of the  source repo in your own account. 

 ## Get Started with Visual Studio Code

 Open Visual Studio Code and on the Welcome page, look for the "Start" section: 

<img class="c300" src=" https://images.jointheleague.org/vscode/vscode_start.png" >

Click on "Clone Git Repository". You can either enter the URL of the Github repo that you want to open, ( look at the top of the window for a text box entry ) or click on "Clone From Github" to log into Github and get a list of recent repos. The one you just cloned should be on top. 

After you open our repo, [continue with this tutorial](https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/python-tutorial) for more about how to use VSCode with Python.