Just a one-phrase background, I have more than 30 years of programming experience, and started programming - there were no source code editors at that time - in Applesoft BASIC's Command Line and saving my code in a tape recorder :DĪnd, just a last word before we begin, if you are a novice programmer (or even a good programmer, but new to MQL5)I strongly recommend to you to stick with Metaeditorfor a while until you have enough comfort and experience to search for a better IDE. I think that I accomplished that with VSC.

One of the main concerns I had was to have the ability to get the compiling results within the IDE in some way, so I don't ever have to switch back and forth between VSC and Metaeditor to get my things done and ready to run. When I started to look around my plan was to switch completely from Metaeditor to a 3rd party solution.

I will not discuss here what was my approach to finally choose VSC as my official MQL5 IDE, the goal of this post is to present a complete guide for those of you who want to experiment a better IDE and eliminating some feature and productivity limitations presented by Metaeditor, that in my personal programming experience made me search for a better alternative. After reviewing a couple of alternative IDEs/Source Code Editors that could be used to code and compile in MQL5 instead of using the original Metaeditor IDE, I decided to go with Visual Studio Code, from Microsoft.

Online visual studio code compiler