Setting up the MinGW compiler and Text Editor

For your convenience, and since we use a 64-bit Windows operating system, we chose MinGW-w64 because it can be used for Windows 32-bits and 64-bits architecture. To install it, simply open your Internet browser and navigate to http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/ to go to the download page, and click on the Download button. Wait for a moment until the mingw-w64-install.exe file is completely downloaded. Refer to the following screenshot to locate the Download button:

Now, execute the installer file. You will be greeted by a Welcoming dialog box. Just press the Next button to go to the Setup Setting dialog box. In this dialog box, choose the latest GCC version (at the writing time this, it is 4.9.2), and the rest of the options are to be chosen, as follows:

Click on the Next button to continue and go to the installation location option. Here, you can change the default installation location. I am going to change the installation location to C:\MinGW-w64 in order to make our next setting easier, but you can keep this default location if you want.

Click on the Next button to go to the next step and wait for a moment until the files are downloaded and the installation process is complete.

Now you have the C++ compiler installed on your machine, but you can only access it from its installed directory. In order to access the compiler from any directory in your system, you have to set the PATH environment by performing the following steps:

It is time to try our Environment Variable setting. Open a new Command Prompt window, either in Administrator or non-Administrator mode, in any active directory except C:\MinGW-w64 and type the following command:

g++ --version

You have configured the proper settings if you see the output informing you the following:

g++ (x86_64-posix-seh-rev2, Built by MinGW-W64 project) 4.9.2

If you are showed a different version number, you might have another GCC compiler on your computer. To solve this problem, you can modify Environment Variable and remove all path environment settings associated with the other GCC compiler, for instance, C:\StrawberryPerl\c\bin.

However, if you do believe that you have followed all the steps correctly, but you still get an error message, as shown in the following snippet, you might have to restart your machine for your new system settings to be set:

'g++' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

Microsoft Windows has been equipped with Notepad, a simple text editor to create plain text files. You can use Notepad to create a C++ file, where the file must contain only plain text formatting. You can also turn to a heavy Integrated Development Environments (IDE) when you want to edit your code, but I prefer a simple, lightweight, and extensible programming plain-text editor, so I choose to use a text editor instead of IDE. Since I will need syntax highlighting when writing code to make it easier to read and understand, I pick Notepad++ as our text editor. You can choose your favorite text editor as long as you save the output file as plain text. Here is the sample of syntax highlighting in Notepad++:

If you decide to use Notepad++ as I did, you can go to http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ to grab the latest version of Notepad++. Find the Download menu on the main page and select the current version link. There, you will find a link to download the installer file. Use the Notepad++ Installer file instead of the package file to get the easiest way to set it up on your machine by following all the instructions on the installer wizard.