- Let's take a look at a few ways
we can run our Python programs in VS Code.
Let's go ahead and open up our Exercise Files folder.
To do that, we're going to click on Open Folder,
and then we're going to choose Exercise Files.
Now the first thing you'll notice
over here on the explorer pane
is that we have a list of all of the folders
inside of our Exercise Files directory,
but there's this one folder that we didn't create, .vscode.
You don't have to worry about
changing anything here for the course.
This is just a special folder created by VS Code
in order to store some metadata.
Let's go ahead and open up one of the files.
We're going to open the one inside of chapter 02,
and we're going to choose 02_07.
This looks really different from what we've seen before
in our simple text editor.
The first thing you notice is the use of line numbers
over here on the left side.
We call this the gutter.
Using line numbers inside of IDEs
makes it easier for us to find codes later on.
For example, on line number three,
we have the print statement, goodbye world.
What's another thing you notice that's really different?
It's the use of color.
We call this syntax highlighting.
This is how we can point out special key words
or various objects inside of our programs.
For example, the print key word is yellow,
whereas the hello world is orange,
but how did VS Code know to choose the colors
for the Python programming language?
Well it's based on the fact that we're using
the .py file extension.
This is the file extension used for Python code.
Now let's say we want to run this code.
We can click anywhere inside of our file,
right-click, and go to Run Python File In Terminal.
Let's do that now.
Notice that we see our output.
Hello world, goodbye world.
We've done this using our IDE.
Now what if we were interested
in running all of the code in a file?
Well we could even use just one portion.
For example, let's run line number three only.
We'll come to this line, right-click,
and we'll choose Run Selection or Line in Python Terminal,
and now we only get goodbye world.
What's really nice is that this
actually watches a real Python shell for us.
So if we want, we could even run other Python commands.
For example, four star four.
This is how we do multiplication in Python.
When we hit enter, we get 16.
Now let's go ahead and exit this
the same way we would our normal terminal
from the command line.
We're going to type exit,
and we're no longer inside of our Python prompt,
and to leave this entire area,
we can just click the close button
that's in the right corner.
Great.
And that's it.
We've seen a few different ways
that we can run our Python programs inside of VS Code,
and it's nice that we have such helpful features
like the line numbers or the syntax highlighting.
I encourage you to explore running
some simple commands on your own
so that you can get the hang of it.