Introduction
Competitive programming is programming in global or national competitions. In competitive programming, the contestants need to submit solutions to some problems given in a specific time period, generally 2 or 3 hours. Here, even a second, a late submission affects your ranking as the earlier the submission, the higher is your score and the better is your ranking. So, it’s always better to solve the problems as fast as possible. Other than practicing a lot using a timer, you can use some tools which will help you in boosting your performance in the contests. So let’s see them one by one.
Also read about, kth largest element in an array and Euclid GCD Algorithm
Sublime Fast Olympics coding setup
This is a plugin in sublime text named “CPP fast Olympic coding.” It helps in:
- So the first step towards having this on your PC is downloading the sublime text editor. For that, you need to go to sublime text and click on download for Windows/Mac/Linux.
-
After the download, while installing sublime text, make sure to check the “add to explorer context menu” box.

- After the sublime text is installed, we need to install the MinGW C++ compiler. For this, you need to go here and click on the blue button near “MinGW-get-setup.exe. Leave the default settings as they are and complete the setup of minGW.
-
When the MinGW installer manager comes up, make sure that you check all the boxes as they are all helpful at one time or the other.

-
Once marked them all for installation, click on installation tab -> update catalogue. A confirmation box like this will appear. Click on review changes.

- After this, the packages will get installed, and then you can wait until they all get downloaded and close the box once it’s done.
- After this, you need to open the sublime text editor and hit ctrl+shift+p or command+shift+p ( in mac).
-
A prompt will appear in which you now need to write install package control and hit enter. The package controller helps us to install new plugins. After the package control is installed, a box like this will appear.

- Click ok, and then again press ctrl+shift+p/cmd+shift+p. Type “Package control: install package,” hit enter, and start loading the repositories.
-
For installing the fast Olympic coding package, press ctrl+shift+p/cmd+shift+p, write fast Olympic coding and hit enter. It will take some time to install, so you need to wait. So now the plugin is installed, you can start coding!!
But wait!! When running a piece of even correct code ( run using ctrl+alt+b/cmd+alt+b), some users might face a compilation error like this:

- For fixing this, you need to add the path of the bin folder your minGW setup to the environment variables in your PC.
-
For this, go to the taskbar and type Edit the system environment variables. The box system properties will open, and you need to click environment variables. A section of system variables is there in the dialog box of environment variables. There, click Path -> Edit -> new -> Add the Path to the bin folder your minGW setup (for example, if you installed MinGW in the C folder, your Path might be C:\MinGW\bin) -> click ok. Restart the sublime text, and now you’re good to go!
Also, if you want the test cases on which you run your code once to be saved until you yourself delete them, and it is not already happening there, you can type ctrl+shift+p -> type FastOlympicCoding: Open Settings. The settings will open, and below the line “algorithms_base”: null, add the line “tests_file_suffix”: “__tests” if it’s not only there.