A.3. Tooling and a quick note on text editors

There are a lot of text editors in the world. And I’m sure they’re all great. However, I’m a programmer and therefore opinionated (and correct), and you should use Intellij. But capitalism says that we’re better off with many options. For Flutter use, I can only recommend these two text editors:

• VS Code
• JetBrains Intellij

Both of these editors have officially supported plugins for Dart.

VSCode is probably the best completely free IDE that exists. Every web developer on the planet is jumping ship to VSCode. It’s the return of the IDE in the web world. And it’s a fantastic option.

That said, Intellij is truly full-featured, and I recommend its use. An unfortunate part of writing code is that we also have to deal with managing a project, and an IDE like Intellij makes your life much easier on that front. Intellij Community Edition is free, and the Dart and Flutter features are fully supported in the free version.

One of the greatest things about the Dart community is that it is ... err ... concise, compared to other languages used to write web apps that I will not name here. Thanks to these IDE plugins and other tooling, you don’t have to mess with linters, formatters, or any of that. If you use the plugins, all that comes for free. In Dart, there’s one way to do it: the right way. I’m kidding (kind of).

Before moving on to the next section, you should install one of these two editors, as well as the Dart plugin.