Didact

Easy interactive tutorials for VS Code.

The Didact framework is designed to instruct users in a useful way regarding how to complete tasks through a combination of text (Markdown- or AsciiDoc-formatted), images, and active links that show VS Code functionality in action. Those links are paired with VS Code’s simple command framework to interact with the IDE directly -- and that provides one-click access to nearly all the functionality VS Code and its extensions have to offer.

Didact offers two avenues to success

1. Published tutorials that walk users through easy-to-follow tutorials to accomplish their goals in an interactive manner.
2. Developer tools to make writing and publishing such tutorials an easy process.

Starting the JavaScript Didact Tutorial

1. Open the Didact Tutorials view in the Explorer activity sidebar.
2. Expand the tree and find HelloWorld with JavaScript in Three Steps.
3. Click the triangle at the end of the line or select Start Didact tutorial from the right-click menu.
4. When the tutorial opens, work through the various steps.

Writing your first Didact tutorial

1. Create a new Markdown or AsciiDoc file with the extension .didact.md or .didact.adoc.
2. Write some text about the action your user will accomplish.
3. Start a new Didact link:

• In Markdown, type [Open a new terminal](), put the cursor between the parentheses () and press Ctrl+Space.
• In AsciiDoc, type link:[Open a new terminal], put the cursor after link:, and press Ctrl+Space.

4. Select Start new Didact command link.
5. Choose a command from the hundreds VS Code has available (like workbench.action.terminal.new) and press Enter.
6. Press Ctrl/Cmd+Alt+D to view your new Didact tutorial and click the link you created! Done!

Available Documentation (Updated!)

Our documentation started in these wiki pages but are now located in GitHub pages here. Included are details about all of Didact's capabilities and many examples to get you started.

Note: The wiki pages are deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Please use the GitHub pages from release 0.4.0 forward.

For a list of available commands, check out the Command Reference.

Current Issues

If you run into issues migrating from an earlier version of Didact (0.3.x or earlier) to 0.4.x, you may need to refresh the tutorial registry. See Troubleshooting in the docs for details.

Ideas or want to contribute?

Check out the project on Github!

The readme has a ton of information about some of the specifics for link formatting, project json format, etc.

And feel free to add issues, submit feature requests, log bugs, etc!

A big thank you to these folks for following our progress!

Data and telemetry

The Didact extension for Visual Studio Code collects anonymous usage data and sends it to Red Hat servers to help improve our products and services. Read our privacy statement to learn more. This extension respects the redhat.telemetry.enabled setting which you can learn more about at https://github.com/redhat-developer/vscode-redhat-telemetry#how-to-disable-telemetry-reporting