I would recommend that you should recommend VS Code, since it's consistent across Linux, macOS, and Windows, and it's an Electron app itself. It supports complexity without being too complex.
I also discovered through trial and error that you need to install npm. npm is available as a module in VS Code, but it is also available as its own installer package. I don't know which is preferable.
VS Code includes native Git support, but for relative newbs the GitHub GUI client is nice and easy to use.
Also FYI this command doesn't work "out of the box":
git clone git@github.com:<your-userid>/joplin.git
since it requires the GitHub user to have SSH keys. The HTTPS version of the command is:
git clone https://github.com/<your-userid>/joplin.git
which works perfectly fine and doesn't require the user to figure out how to set up GitHub SSH.
You might want to explain how to do a fork and how to create a branch, since it's better not to assume the user has a lot of familiarity with Git. Most of these things can be accomplished using the GitHub web interface (which also includes a direct link to open in GitHub Desktop), and consolidating as many steps as possible into as few applications as possible could help streamline the instructions.
I haven't gotten to this, yet, myself, but you could probably start with the instructions in joplin / BUILD.md. It would probably be worth seeing how many of the build dependencies can be installed through VS Code. I'm sure I will see for myself soon enough!
Again, joplin / CONTRIBUTING.md would probably be the place to start for this. Obviously the GitHub document should remain canonical—and indeed you should link to it, as with BUILD.md, but you could summarize the salient bits here. Considering the Joplin Discourse forum is substantially more newb-oriented than the GitHub is, the instructions here should be much more straightforward and explicit (though clarity in writing is equally important on GitHub, as well.)
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