Setting Up Your Development Environment

Any text editor can edit Rust code, but an editor that understands Rust makes learning much easier — especially with a compiler as strict as Rust's, where seeing errors as you type saves a lot of time.

• Visual Studio Code with the rust-analyzer extension (published by the Rust team) — free and cross-platform. rust-analyzer is the Rust language server: it provides autocomplete, go-to-definition, inline type hints, and shows compiler errors as you type. Add the CodeLLDB extension if you want a graphical debugger.
• RustRover by JetBrains — a full IDE dedicated to Rust, free for non-commercial use.

Whichever you choose:

• Turn on format on save. Rust code has one standard layout, produced by rustfmt, and letting the editor apply it means you never think about spacing or brace placement.
• Open the project folder (the one containing Cargo.toml), not a single file. rust-analyzer needs the whole Cargo project to understand your code.

To try a snippet without installing anything, the Rust Playground at play.rust-lang.org compiles and runs small programs in the browser.