I am one of many who enjoy using Visual Studio Code as my code editor. Among 86,544 responses, 73.71% of users in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey for 2023 said that Visual Studio Code is their preferred IDE (integrated development environment). But I am not here to talk about how great VSC is (ok, maybe just a little ;)).
Most importantly, I wanted to share some of the extensions that have been very helpful in optimizing my VS Code experience.
LiveServer – Probably the first one I installed when I started coding. If you are beginning your programming journey you might want to do the same. It allows you to “launch a local development server with live reload feature for static & dynamic pages.”
Prettier – This is a very popular code formatter with over 30 million installs. It formats your code after a set of rules making it more consistent and prettier, if you will.
Git Graph – I got a tip from a friend about this one. As Git can sometimes be a bit hard to understand, having a visual presentation of your repository might be helpful. You can also use it to perform Git Actions and you can customise the way it looks.
Snippets – There are different kinds of snippets that will speed up your coding with different languages/frameworks. Having a boilerplate instead of typing from scratch felt like magic when I first started using these.
Auto close tag and Auto rename tag – These are very self-explanatory and incredibly useful for when you don’t want to look through numerous lines of code to see which tag you forgot to delete or rename.
Relative Path – Use the given shortcut and select a file you want and voila – you will be given a relative path to it.
Code spell checker – “A basic spell checker that works well with code and documents.” Honestly, I got this one as I had a couple of typos sneak into my TODO doc and now I don’t have to worry about it anymore.
Color Highlight – I am a very visual person and being able to see the colors I’m using directly in my document is a dream to me. I heard about this one from a friend and have been loving it ever since.
CSS Peek
