I am a vim user, and I agree, start with whatever text editor is reasonable, vim is not at that stage, if you were doing intro to system administration, vim pro

I am a vim user, and I agree, start with whatever text editor is reasonable, vim is not at that stage, if you were doing intro to system administration, vim prowess would be advisable, but not for learning to program. Use vscode. I think the advice are good, I'd like to add my own experience.. When I started programming, the hardest thing for me was : Understanding how to build the source code into a binary, and what parts were "code that became the executable" and "code that makes the executable be created" Too much magic at the beginning is terrible, don't start with Makefiles or CMake. Start with a one-liner that directly calls the compiler and linker. When your one-liner gets too long, make it into a script. When you consider doing things in your script with loops or conditionals: Now is the time for a Makefile. When your project moves out of your compter and into a wider community, and people start being annoyed at your build process, look into CMake. Also, stay away from anything that is cloud, anything you can't execute locally, it only adds extra abstractions and error scenarios. Paradoxically, the first environment in which I found it easy to get my code executed was with Apache and PHP, but the underlying infrastructure was rather complex, and it didn't allow me to do real programming, I couldn't open new windows or call any graphics APIs, but it was useful for learning algorithms and "thinking like a programmer".