Developer Environment

Windows or Mac? It's really your preference. If you have a preference, use that. If you are 100% on the fence, use a Mac due to the terminal. But I'm biased.

I will add a lot more to this page as this is a very very complicated subject. Please just see me to get to started. Please don't use Git or Github until I help you.... unless you are brave.

• Visual Studio Code (VSCode) - The best text editor alive I believe. It's lightweight and very good. It is the most popular editor used. It works much better than Zed as a primary editor and autocompletes very well based on your entire code base.
• Zed - This is how we will use LLMs. VSCode can do it too, but other IDEs are better for coding with LLMs. After some research, we will use Zed. You do not need this yet, this is for much later. Use VSCode.
• Terminal - On a mac this is called terminal. On Windows you will use WSL. You may be able to get by without dealing with this, but not forever. Many developers work on Linux, Mac, or Unix simply for the linux environment.

For both of VSCode and Zed you will just open your project folder. All your files will be on the left side. Do not open just a singular file. VSCode and Zed will understand how your project files talk to each other.

>Want to see all my code on GitHub? The project is here.

SolidJS

Go to the SolidJS website. Click get started. Go to the "Try Solid" section and the lines of terminal instructions that start with npx. Don't do the typescript one for now.

Go to the folder you want to make the folder for in. For example, I go to "~/projects/". I recommend this folder because it will have thousands of files you don't want backed up to iCloud. In terminal -

    cd ~
    mkdir projects
    cd projects
    

The above commands will put you in your user directory "~" then make a folder called projects. Next you go into that folder with the change directory command "cd". Your first command to run is -

    npx degit solidjs/templates/js my-app
    

This should say "command not found". To use NPX, we need NPM, and to install NPM, we need NVM. Confused?

Node is the program that we will be running in the terminal. It is run with npm which is "node package manager." To install npm, we need "node version manager" or nvm. This is important because you may run multiple versions of node. Run the following code in your terminal. Then close and reopen terminal. NVM should work.

    curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.40.3/install.sh | bash
    

Next, let's install the LTS node (Long Term Support). Run the code below

    nvm install --reinstall-packages-from=current 'lts/*'
    

Now you have nvm, node, npm, and npx. Now we can run that first command above that starts with npx from the solidjs website. Go to ~/projects. Remember that ~ is the same as /Users/username. You are going to /Users/username/projects.

When the npx command runs, it will create a whole new project in a folder called 'my-app. Go into that folder by typing `cd my-app`. Next we need to install all the solidjs dependencies. Type `npm install` while you are in that folder.

It's ready to use and modify! Type `npm run dev` which will open a web server. Copy/paste the link http://localhost:3000 into your browser to see the website.

In VSCode and open the `my-app` folder. That's a solidJS project. You can continue following the "getting started" on their website.

Let's move into our first framework learning, SolidJS