Microsoft MakeCode is based on the open source project Microsoft Programming Experience Toolkit (PXT). Microsoft MakeCode
is the name in the user-facing editors, PXT
is used in all the GitHub sources.
PXT is a framework for creating special-purpose programming experiences for beginners, especially focused on computer science education. PXT's underlying programming language is a subset of TypeScript (leaving out JavaScript dynamic features).
The main features of PXT are:
- a Blockly-based code editor along with converter to the text format
- a Monaco code editor that powers VS Code, editor's features are listed here.
- extensibility support to define new blocks in TypeScript
- an ARM Thumb machine code emitter
- a command-line package manager
More info:
Examples of Editors built with PXT:
master
is the active development branch, currentlyv1.*
buildsv0
is the servicing branch forv0.*
builds
Please follow the instructions here.
If you are modifying your own instance of PXT and want a target (such as pxt-microbit) to use your local version, cd to the directory of the target (pxt-microbit, in our example, which should be a directory sibling of pxt) and perform
npm link ../pxt
First, install Node: minimum version 5.7. Then install the following:
npm install -g jake
To build the PXT command line tools:
npm install
jake
Then install the pxt
command line tool (only need to do it once):
npm install -g pxt
After this you can run pxt
from anywhere within the build tree.
To start the local web server, run pxt serve
from within the root
of an app target (e.g. pxt-microbit). PXT will open the editor in your default web browser.
Alternatively, if you clone your pxt and pxt-microbit directories next to each
other, you can serve your local pxt-microbit repo from within the pxt repo by
running jake serve
.
There are a number of custom icons (to use in addition
to http://semantic-ui.com/elements/icon.html) in the svgicons/
directory.
These need to be 1000x1000px
. Best start with an existing one. To see available icons go to
http://localhost:3232/icons.html (this file, along with icons.css
containing
the generated WOFF icon font, is created during build).
If you're having trouble with display of the icon you created, try:
npm install -g svgo
svgo svgicons/myicon.svg
The tests are located in the tests/
subdirectory and are a combination of node and
browser tests. To execute them, run jake test
in the root directory.
MIT
This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact [email protected] with any additional questions or comments.