Welcome back to GitHub for Beginners. We’ve covered a lot this season, so make sure to check out our other episodes. Our most recent one was all about open source, what it is and how to contribute to the community.
This time, we’re going to take a look at VS Code, a free popular source code editor provided by Microsoft. It has a fair amount of functionality built in that integrates with GitHub, which is what we’ll be taking a look at today. Using GitHub in VS Code reduces context switching, streamlines your workflow, and boosts your productivity. By the end of this post, you’ll understand how to use VS Code to initialize a repository, switch branches, as well as stage, commit, and push your changes. And the best part is, you’ll be able to do all this without leaving the editor.
Note that if you want to follow along with this blog post (or the video), you will need to install both Git and VS Code. If you need a refresher on how to install Git, you can check out one of our earlier GitHub for Beginners episodes.
As always, if you prefer to watch the video or want to reference it, we have all of our GitHub for Beginners episodes available on YouTube.
First some basics
