cs2381: Required Software

The software you need to install to work on a personal machine is:

A properly configured editor:

• VS Code (>= 1.78) or VScodium with “Extension Pack for Java”
• Notepad++, Bluefish
• Neovim, Emacs ( Spacemacs, Doom Emacs )

Modern editors tend to provide code completion features. These are likely to be more confusing than helpful; it is recommended to disable them at least until you’re comfortable writing code manually.

Disabling awful popups in VSCode isn’t exposed in the settings editor. To get into the config file editor, press Ctrl+Shift+P and find “Preferences: Open User Settings (JSON)”, then add the following to your config object. The second option here removes parameter hints, which is really helpful.

    "editor.quickSuggestions":{
        "other": false,
        "comments": false,
        "strings": false
    },
    "editor.parameterHints.enabled": false,

The dev tools:

• OpenJDK >= 17
• Apache Maven (>= 3.9.4)

On Linux (Mint, Ubuntu, Debian), that’s:

sudo apt install openjdk-17-jdk maven

To run the test script and see how autograding will go:

• Windows: Strawberry Perl (>= 5.32 64 bit)
• Linux and Mac: Perl is probably installed by default. On Linux, a missing “Foo::Bar” is generally the “libfoo-bar-perl” package.

Other recommendations on Windows:

• Linux commands in Windows command prompt: GoW
• Just get a whole Linux on Windows: WSL with Debian or Ubuntu
• The 7-Zip archive tool might help for inspecting .tar.gz archives

Installing Maven on Windows/Mac

Maven is tricky, because it doesn’t come with an installer. Start by reading the installation instructions, and then consider:

• You should unpack the archive outside your Downloads folder.
• You need to add the “bin” directory to your PATH environment variable.

To change your PATH, try searching for “Add directory to windows/mac/linux path”.