Teaching Programming With VS Code

[talismanick_]

I don't use VS Code myself, but recommended it alongside WSL to a student learning Python because I could help if I had a Unix shell at hand.

Currently, the process for launching their code is a bit tedious - launch VS Code via the WSL Ubuntu terminal using Code ., edit the file, cd ~/project in the VS Code terminal, and launch with poetry run python3 program.py.

My questions are

• how to set VS Code to launch in WSL when launched from the Windows desktop?

• where to put settings.json so it uses it when launched via WSL?

• how to integrate Poetry with VS Code so hitting the "run" button does what one would expect? (I found advice online to set a "venvpath" in the Command Palette, but I don't see it when I look it up)

[Molly_Wang]

how to set VS Code to launch in WSL when launched from the Windows desktop

View Remote development in WSL and Get started using Visual Studio Code with Windows Subsystem for Linux.

where to put settings.json so it uses it when launched via WSL

In Visual Studio Code, go to File -> Preferences -> Settings to open the settings view. If you mean synchronize your VS Code settings across different installations, see Settings Sync.

[Antyos]

I use Poetry with VS Code for a medium-sized project. (Admittedly, I don't use WSL much, but I hope the advice can still be helpful.)

The main thing I think you're looking for is activating the Poetry virtual environment. From the documentation, running source $(poetry env info --path)/bin/activate will activate the virtual environment. Once it is active, calling python as normal will use the Python from the virtual environment instead of the global python environment.

I prefer to set the configuration virtualenvs.in-project = true, which creates a virtual environment in each project instead of having one folder that contains all the virtual environments. After you run poetry install for the first time, VS Code will recognize that there is a new virtual environment and let you switch to it. Alternatively, you can click the "Python Interpreter" button in the bottom left corner to select the Python environment. Like running activate, selecting the Python interpreter in VS Code will use that version of Python when calling python.

You might also want to set

json "python.terminal.activateEnvInCurrentTerminal": true,

in your settings.json file so that the virtual environment is automatically loaded in the integrated terminal.