So you have `fastn`, and you are eager to start writing some `ftd` code. But
before that let's setup a decent programming editor. Programs are written in
"plain text" files. Editing plain text files is usually done best with special
text editors. We have many to chose from, old timers use ViM or Emacs. Then
there are VSCode and Jetbrains family of editors. These editors not only are
quite good at editing text files, they also come with a plathora of features,
like file browser that lets you easily see all the files in your "project",
tools like Find and Replace to quickly find things across your files, and do
mass replace, which can be handy if you change your mind about name of something
for example.
Some of these editors also come with programming language specific tools, which
let you perform operations related to specific tasks in that language etc. Some
of these are also called "Programming IDEs", integrated development
environments.
This can be a lot if you are getting started. We recommend an editor called
[SublimeText](https://www.sublimetext.com/3). This is how it looks like on
my machine:
Notice how you can see the content of the file being edited, the name of the
file is `editor.ftd`. You can also see a bunch of tabs, other files like
`install.ftd`, `terminal.ftd` and `FASTN.ftd` are also open as tabs. Further
notice the left hand side containing all the files and folders present in the
"package" I am editing.
If you look carefully you will find a green vertical line, and a few dots,
these are giving some information about the version control status of the files.
You can ignore them for now.
Syntax Highlighting
One particular thing you would notice is that some of the text are colored,
e.g. in the first line, you see the word `import` is in orange color, and the
text after the `:` is in green color. These coloring, or "highlights", are
based on rules of the language, in this case we are editing a `ftd` file, so
the highlight is based on `ftd`. They are also called "syntax highlighting",
as they let you see different parts of "syntax" clearly.
The same text without syntax highlighting looks like this:
A tad boring if you ask me. Syntax highlighting is completely optional, you can
write code without highlighting at all, but they help. Especially more advanced
highligting performed by some editors show wrong lines using special
highligting, e.g.:
Error Highlighting In CLion
As you can see there are a lot of tiny red colored "squigly lines", informing
the editor that something is wrong. This is `CLion`, an editor from the
`JetBrains` family of editors.
We do not yet have this level of error reporting support for `ftd`/`fastn`, but
we are working on it.
Syntax Highlighting Support For `ftd` in SublimeText
SublimeText comes with syntax highlighting support for some languages, but not
for `ftd` yet. We have written [a guide to enable syntax highlighting in
SublimeText](/sublime/-/book/).
Next Step
Once you are done, we can move on to creating our [hello world
program](/book/hello-world/).