I finally set up my Raspberry Pi 4 the other day, and spent last night and today getting things together in order to do an image recognition project that I've been thinking on. However before I got going on that I wanted a good code editor with some project management features. The pre-installed options seemed lacking. And vi is a fine text editor, but I really wanted a lightweight, general-purpose editor/IDE to work with. I've been using Visual Studio Code on my laptop, and saw that it was possible to run it on the Pi. Cool. But I quickly discovered that the Debian package from MS is not built for ARM, so I headed over to github and pulled down the source and proceeded to build the OSS version of VSCode. After a couple of hours of working through errors and editing build files (ugh.. electron.. such bloat!), I was able to build and run it! Here's a screenshot:
I tried, but was not able to build a .deb package from the source on the Pi, but it runs from the command line script and seems to have enough of the features enabled to suit my needs. I might try cross-compiling from a bigger machine to see if that works, but meanwhile I can move on. Now what was it that I was going to do? Oh yeah..