running “Hello, World!” is the hardest part in learning Elixir. Its a little crazy. But as soon as that is out of the way, I promise, It’ll be a fun ride.

If you created your project with mix new Hello there is a module Hello in lib.
In there is a comment that tells you to run:

iex> Hello.hello()
      :world

what it doesn’t tell you is, that you have to start iex in this way

iex -S mix

You can also run the function directly

mix run -e Hello.hello 

but you should add something that you can see on the console first, like

def hello do
    IO.puts("hello")
end

Note: If there are processes involved (later!) you’ll need to add --no-halt but then you’ll but build a Supervision-Tree (later!!) anyway (and you run an OTP-application and not just one function).

In the beginning I’d just put everything in tests and run

mix test

To run the test with a vscode-hotkey look here:

https://pragdave.me/blog/2018/06/13/visual-studio-code-elixir-tests.html

VScode is not an IDE, it tries to, but at the end it is “just” a smart editor.

Don’t try to rely on IDE features, learn to do things from the terminal.

mix is easy to use.

To run a single file script, just do elixir script.ex, its not how things usually are done though.