Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology
While I continue to use Spyder as my preferred Python code editor, I also tried out Visual Studio Code. Handily, this Integrated Development Environment also has facilities for working with R and Julia code as well as MarkDown text editing and adding the required extensions is enough for these applications; it helps that there is an unofficial Grammarly extension for content creation.
My Python code development makes use of the Pylance extension and it works a little differently from Spyder when it comes to including files using import statements. Spyder will look into the folder where the base script is located but the default behaviour of Pylance is that it looks in the root path of your workspace. This meant that any code that ran successfully in Spyder failed in Visual Studio Code.
The way around this was to add the required location using the python.analysis.extraPaths setting for the workspace. That meant opening Settings by navigating to File > Preferences > Settings in the menu system and entering python.analysis.extraPaths into the search box. That took me to the section that I needed and I then clicked on Add Item before entering the required path and clicking on the OK button. That was enough to fix the problem and all worked as it should after that.