Later on, one should move to a more powerful editor like vi or emacs (I personally prefer vi and nice tutor for vi can be accessed by tyoing vimtutor on shell prompt) Compiling the code To compile the code, again go to shell prompt ( Yes, on linux you will soon get use to shell prompt for almost every task) and execute the command gcc progfilename eg. gcc helloworld.c or g++ progfilename Note: gcc is C compiler for Linux (written by GNU) and g++ is C++ compiler for linux (written by GNU) In case there is no output => your code compiled successfully In case there is an output => you will see the output is readable, it tells you which lines of your code has errors/warnings.