Hello World Tutorial

This is a short tutorial to help you get started with Tenacious C. After working through this tutorial, you will have a program that prints “Hello World” to the console window.

In order to run this tutorial, you must have Tenacious C installed. If you haven’t installed it already, you can download it here for free.

Step 1: Launch Tenacious C

Open Tenacious C by double-clicking on the desktop icon. You should see a blank project like this. (Note: you might encounter some popups reminding you to enter a license key. Press “Cancel” to get rid of those.)

Step 2: Create New Project

We will create our Hello World project by selecting the “File” menu and then selecting the “New Project” sub menu.

This will bring up the project wizard:

Enter hello-world for the project name and then press “Finish” (Note: you cannot use spaces in the project name)

Step 3: Let’s Write Some Code

At this point, you should have the skeleton project depicted below. Now, we’re going to add some code to it.

Add the following two lines to the main function:

printf("Hello World\n");
return 1;

Once you have added that, press the green arrow on the toolbar to start the program:

Step 4: Step Through The Code

When you run a program in Tenacious C, execution stops on the first line. The current line of execution is highlighted in yellow.

In order to see the printf statement execute, you will need to step to the next line. You can do that by pressing the yellow arrow on the toolbar:

Now bring the console window to the front by pressing the “Show Command Prompt” button:

And finally you can see the output of your program. Hello World!