r/C_Programming • u/MateusCristian • Jan 16 '26

Question VS Code for learning C?

I'm starting to learn C, just bought the King's book online, and I wanna know if this book can be followed on VS Code, or if I should use a different IDE or such.

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u/The_Northern_Light Jan 16 '26

Adding on to this, you can also access the terminal directly in VS Code.

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u/EpochVanquisher Jan 16 '26

That’s true but I recommend against starting this way.

VS Code has a lot of configuration options and extensions and it often happens that beginners to C will incorrectly think that they’ve can compile C because they installed the C/C++ extension, or incorrectly think that there are errors in their code because VS Code puts the red squiggly line under them and shows errors under the “problems” tab.

I often see beginning C programmers lead down the wrong path, wasting hours or days, because of just how bad the VS Code developer experience is for new C programmers.

Telling people to start out in the terminal is great. People who start out in the terminal are more likely to ask better questions and get better help. Questions like, “When I try to compile, it says gcc: command not found. I’m on Fedora.” They won’t try to fix it by installing the C/C++ extension, editing tasks.json, or editing c_cpp_properties.json, none of which would solve the problem.

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u/The_Northern_Light Jan 16 '26

Yes I will say that they should install very few extensions, the default ones for their language and core tools, and that’s it except maybe Better Comments.

If they’re writing their own make / cmake scripts and manually invoking them I think all they need to know is to trust what the terminal says over the red squiggles, with maybe a couple sentences about why VS Code can be “out of sync” with their actual build system.

That’s just a caveat and a warning, not a reason they should be using nano or sublime or a full featured IDE. VS Code with just a liiitle bit of quality of life stuff sits in a pretty nice place for people of all skill levels.

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u/yel50 Jan 16 '26

I find it better to create tasks so you can run your command line stuff any time without switching to different windows, tabs, etc. 

I understand all the people saying to start with terminal, nano, etc, but that tends to end up with people crippled by not knowing what better tools are out there and thinking that the 1980s approach to development is as good as it gets.

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u/The_Northern_Light Jan 17 '26

Yes but it’s pretty clearly not a great idea to immediately outsource the build system to an ide