Installing and Configuring Our Development Environment

Much of our time writing Rust will be spent in a text editor. Most people need text editors, but there is little consensus on what type is best. We’ll spend enough time in our text editor that we want to find one that’s a good fit for us and update them if they start to fall apart. If you’ve written code before, you probably already have a favorite text editor or IDE.

It’s a good idea to find an editor that supports Rust. At the very least, we want syntax highlighting because it can make reading code a lot easier.

Autocompletion and debugger integration can also be very helpful. There are many choices, including:

• Kate, Notepad++, and GEdit are all quite usable with Rust. We don’t get much language integration beyond syntax highlighting, though.
• EMACS and Vim/Neovim can both integrate with Rust Analyser, the Rust Language Server, and debugging tools.
• JetBrains make CLion and IntelliJ, both of which integrate well with Rust.
• Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code, used alongside the Rust Analyzer and CodeLLDB plugins, works very well for Rust.
• Sublime Text has Rust integration available.

Find an editor or IDE that works for you. Once you’ve selected a development environment, it’s time to learn about how Rust arranges and manages our projects.