This guide covers best practices for preparing your environment to develop within the Urbit ecosystem.

Creating a development ship

To do work with Hoon, we recommended using a "fake" ship -- one that's not connected to the network.

Because such a ship has no presence on the network, you don't need an Azimuth identity. You just need to have installed the Urbit binary.

To create a fake ship named ~zod, run the command below. You can replace zod with any valid Urbit ship-name.

./urbit -F zod

This should take a couple of minutes, during which you should see a block of boot messages, starting with the Urbit version number.

Hoon support in text editors

A variety of plugins have been built to provide support for the Hoon language in different text editors:

Atom

Atom is free and open-source and runs on all major operating systems. It is available here. A package for Hoon support is maintained by Tlon and may be obtained using the package manager within the editor by searching for Hoon.

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is closed-source, but may be downloaded for free and there is no enforced time limit for evaluation. It runs on all major operating systems. It is available here.

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is free and open-source and runs on all major operating systems. It is available here. Hoon support may be acquired in the Extensions menu within the editor by searching for Hoon.

Emacs

Emacs is free and open-source and runs on all major operating systems. It is available here. Hoon support is available with hoon-mode.el.

Vim

Vim is free and open-source and runs on all major operating systems. It is available here. Hoon support is available with hoon.vim and is maintained by Tlon.