These programs are not designed for editing code. Now, you might be tempted to open this file with something like Word, or Notepad, or TextEdit, but this would be a really bad idea. For that, we're going to need to do a couple of other things. But actually, what we're going to want to do is we're going to want to edit our sketch.js file.

If you're on a Mac, you can do a contextual click, and you can choose Open With, and you can choose your favorite browser, be it Chrome, or Safari, or Firefox, and open the index.html file with that browser. The way we do this is we go to index.html file. I'm going to show you a quick way to run a sketch. The important point is that we need all three files to run our sketch, and they need to stay in this folder. The final file is sketch.js file, and this is the only file that we'll edit during our time on intro to programming. This is where all the library code for p5.js is stored. We're going to use this to run our file in a moment. We have this because every p5.js sketch is actually a web page.

I'm going to talk you through these files now. So, looking into the folder, we can see that there are three files. On other platforms, you might need to do something different, but in any case, you won't need to download any extra software to do this.

If you're on a Mac, all you need to do is double-click the file, and folder will open. The next thing you're going to need to do is to extract the file because it's a zip file. Now, the first thing that you need to do is download the example sketch from the Coursera platform.

In this video, I'm going to show you how to run your first sketch and edit it using the Brackets IO editor.

Brackets editor download for mac