Prior to getting the MacBook Air as my portable beater machine, I was temporarily using my old HP DM1-4027. As expected, despite having 8GB RAM, it wasn’t very quick so I wasn’t going to get away with using VSCode as it’s not exactly resources friendly is it?

Enter “Pantheon Code”, a text editor that is built into ElementaryOS. It looks simplistic, offers syntax highlighting, git integration and it can load a terminal window into a panel at the bottom. What more do you want when you’re on the move!?

So it’s fairly straight forward to get going, by installing pantheon-code through pacman:

sudo pacman -S pantheon-code

It’ll add a shortcut to the Development menu, but you may be unlucky in that it doesn’t load first time. And you don’t get any messages either. So let’s run io.elementary.code manually and see if it spits any errors out to the terminal.

io.elementary.code: error while loading shared libraries: libvte-2.91.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Ah, so there’s a dependency that it needs which isn’t included as part of the original install. Let’s install that (and this is where I stumbled and the reason for this post) by installing the vte3 package:

sudo pacman -S vte3

Once that’s installed, everything is working fine. Hope that helped you, as it tripped me up and even ChatGPT couldn’t help at the time!