Constantly switching between different tasks and tools requires your brain to jump from one thought process to another. Developers often prefer long blocks of uninterrupted work to get into deep work.
Extensions that help you stay in the editor reduce context switching and help you reach the state of flow.
Let’s look at some of the most useful ones.
1. Git History
Git History helps you avoid switching from VS Code editor to GitHub. It'll show you:
- git log along with the graph and details
- previous copy of the file
- the history of a file or a line in a file (Git Blame) and more!
2. Image preview
The Image Preview extension provides inline previews for images included HTML file types. The extension shows a pop-up window in the editor surface, and an optional image preview in the gutter, which can be toggled on or off in User Settings.
3. Stepsize
Stepsize allows you to:
- create, view, and edit codebase issues, such as technical debt, refactoring work, and other defects directly from your editor.
- you can then collaborate on these issues with your teammates, upvoting important issues, adding key issues to your sprints with the Jira integration, and resolving them - all directly in the editor.
It is an excellent tool to reduce tool switching while improving your codebase.
4. Browser Preview
Browser Preview for VS Code enables you to open a real browser preview inside your editor that you can debug.
• Browser preview inside VS Code (Powered by headless Chromium).
• Ability to have multiple previews open at the same time.
• Debuggable. Launch urls and attach Debugger for Chrome to the browser view instance, and debug within VS Code.
5. Remote - Containers
The Remote - Containers extension lets you use a Docker container as a full-featured development environment. Whether you deploy to containers or not, containers make a great development environment because you can:
• Develop with a consistent, easily reproducible toolchain on the same operating system you deploy to.
• Quickly swap between different, separate development environments and safely make updates without worrying about impacting your local machine.
• Make it easy for new team members / contributors to get up and running in a consistent development environment.
6. Excel Viewer
This extension is a must for devs who are dealing a lot with CSV files. It provides read-only viewers for CSV files and Excel spreadsheets within the current VS Code workspace, and will easily save you hours of work!
7. Dash
Dash is an API Documentation Browser and Code Snippet Manager. Dash instantly searches offline documentation sets for 200+ APIs, 100+ cheat sheets and more. You can even generate your own docsets or request docsets to be included.
Bonus Extension: Vsinder
Vsinder is a dating app for devs where you swipe on code. If you think this is crazy, just check out this review!
Do you have any favourite extensions that help you stay focused? Share in the comments!
Top comments (9)
Nice list! I don't use VSCode anymore, and if I did I would suggest a bit more.
Also, in the cover image the guy is using sublime, not VSCode ;)
Caught that as well
Why did you stop using VS Code?
I switched to vim as it was better suited for me. The main reason was because my laptop didn't have enough RAM to handle VSCode + other apps.
Understandable.
I recently learned about
nvimand started using it and will probably continue to. Its amazing so far!I would also recommend Thunder Client, it gives a UI similar to postman all within vs code so you can test APIs really quick.
Hello,
Do checkout my article where i have listed around 60 VS Code Extensions which is very much helpful for developers and makes developer's life easier.
capscode.in/blog/useful-vs-code-ex...
Thanks,
@capscode
Stepsize looks unnecessary. It does not work without registration. They try to add it to any post for vscod extensions. That is why I think that this is the main sponsor of these articles
Finally a useful "VS Code Extension list", thanks.