You can use pretty much any text editor such as VI, Emacs, or gedit to write your Swift code. It can be pretty painful at times to use these text editors to write code, especially when you are accustomed to using standard IDEs, which come with code completion. If you want to spend a little money, you could get an IDE (such as CLion) that comes with a Swift plugin, but there is one free code editor that works really well with Swift. That editor is Visual Studio Code from Microsoft.

Yes, Microsoft makes a free code editor that can run on Linux and can edit Swift files (are you as surprised as I was?). I was pretty skeptical at first, but once I started using it, I realized that it was the best Swift editor for Linux that I could find at the time I wrote this book. To download Visual Studio Code, you can go to https://code.visualstudio.com, and select the download link. Keep in mind that, when we use Visual Studio Code to write applications in Swift, it is nothing more than a code editor. We cannot run or debug our code from within Visual Studio Code.

Hopefully, as more developers use Swift on Linux, we will begin to see some good developer tools emerge.