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Nick Taylor
Nick Taylor Subscriber

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at iamdeveloper.com

What's an awesome VS Code extension you recently installed?

I just came across a simple yet awesome VS Code extension tonight care of Elijah Manor.

Basically it dims code that currently isn't selected. Here it is in action.

So what's an awesome VS Code extension you recently installed? 👨‍💻

P.S.: It's a bit out of date, but here's my VS Code setup for those interested.

Top comments (76)

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edisonpappi profile image
Edison Augusthy

Peacok -- it surprise with colored sidebars

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laurieontech profile image
Laurie

This plugin has been such a revelation for me! It always drove me nuts to have multiple projects open and accidentally be in the wrong one. Especially during the period when I was porting my site from one framework to another and had both projects open. Too similar! I accidentally wrote in the wrong project way too often.

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john_papa profile image
John Papa

That’s great to hear that you like it so much!

Enjoy!

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nickytonline profile image
Nick Taylor

I hear that @john_papa knows a bit about VS Code and web dev. 😉

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john_papa profile image
John Papa

Meh. He’s ok.

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john_papa profile image
John Papa

Glad you like it!

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codercatdev profile image
Alex Patterson
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ahmadawais profile image
Ahmad Awais ⚡️ • Edited

🦄 Shades of Purple theme — I'm biased (I made it).

sop

🎉 P.S. celebrating its crossing 1 Million devs.

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hyftar profile image
Simon Landry

God I love it so much! Sadly I prefer using Atom 😭

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ahmadawais profile image
Ahmad Awais ⚡️

Help me build one for Atom, or I can send in a discount coupon for my VSCode.pro course and convert you to a VSCode user :)

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hyftar profile image
Simon Landry

I would be honored to help you convert it for Atom! 😃

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ahmadawais profile image
Ahmad Awais ⚡️

Here's the link with VSCode theme and has all the colors in the README. Start there and let me know if you get stuck. github.com/ahmadawais/shades-of-pu...

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nickytonline profile image
Nick Taylor

You should give VS Code another try. 😉

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raisaugat profile image
Saugat Rai • Edited

I use Indent Rainbow with custom settings which I found on a medium blog long ago.
These are the custom settings:
"indentRainbow.colors": [
"rgba(16,16,16,0.2)",
"rgba(16,16,16,0.4)",
"rgba(16,16,16,0.6)",
"rgba(16,16,16,0.8)",
"rgba(16,16,16,1)"
],

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tombyrer profile image
Tom Byrer

Thanks! I saw that in a screenshot a few weeks ago & have been looking for it.

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dylantientcheu profile image
Dylan Tientcheu

I think it was my post, thank you
You can find it here.

medium.com/free-code-camp/here-are...

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raisaugat profile image
Saugat Rai

I should thank you instead. :)

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jackharner profile image
Jack Harner 🚀

Just curious, why do you have it fade back out?

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raisaugat profile image
Saugat Rai

Actually the settings are a little bit out of order. Thanks for noticing. :). I'll update it.

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frostqui profile image
Diego López

TabNine

  • Indexes your whole project, reading your .gitignore to determine which files to index.
  • Type long variable names in just a few keystrokes using the mnemonic completion engine.
  • Zero configuration. TabNine works out of the box.
  • Highly responsive: typically produces a list of suggestions in less than 10 milliseconds.

marketplace.visualstudio.com/items...

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limark profile image
Mark Li

I am an Angular developer from China.

Here are the Angular extensions which I installed, all of them are awesome.

  • Angular Inline
  • Angular Language Service
  • Angular Snippets
  • Chrome Debugger
  • Editor Config
  • Material Icon Theme
  • npm
  • Peacock
  • Prettier
  • tslint
  • Winter is Coming theme

The Code Spell Checker is helpful for Chinese developer, it can check the source code.

The last one is GitLens, I think you will love it after you install it.

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tombyrer profile image
Tom Byrer

Nice theme; first I heard about out. Yes, GitLens is helpful, especially if more than you touch the code.

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dreamchild7 profile image
dreamchild7

I love winter is coming theme and prettier.

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lucasgdb profile image
Lucas Bittencourt

VS Live Share! It's awesome.

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aaronpowell profile image
Aaron Powell

Yes! Live Share is amazing!

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sndrx profile image
sndrx • Edited

WakaTime it's a recent and useful VS Code extension that I really enjoy. It tracks the time I spend coding every day and it really helps me see the progress that I make.

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k_penguin_sato profile image
K-Sato

I've been very tempted to switch to VS code from Atom🤔.
Sorry, very random.

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glweems profile image
Garrett Weems

do it. no brainer

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jackharner profile image
Jack Harner 🚀

Like everyone else is saying, do it! I started with Atom, Switched to Sublime text, and finally landed on VS Code. The built in git integration, and the built in terminal are life savers.

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vier31 profile image
Jan Schröder • Edited

The build in terminal brought me to VS code. There was an extension for that in atom, but it was so sluggish.

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nickytonline profile image
Nick Taylor

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Omar Bahareth

What I imagined Atom being as a text editor from Github is what made me stick to Atom for so long. Last year I realized that VS Code is the one realizing that vision. The ecosystem, the features, the DX (Developer Experience), and the performance are all what I imagined Atom eventually becoming but Visual Studio Code got there faster.

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Tom Byrer

Unless there is a specific Atom plugin you need that is not available for VSCode. it is more than worth the effort.

Ecosystem is better, & since MicroSoft bought GitHub, I would not be surprised if Atom is back-burnered.

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ahmadawais profile image
Ahmad Awais ⚡️ • Edited

Do it. I can help! Shameless plug → VSCode.pro

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highcenburg profile image
Vicente G. Reyes

Do it! Vs code starts up a gazillion years faster than atom😂

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vycoder profile image
yev

Not my recent but I always add it to all IDE I use: Power Mode. It's nothing useful but a visual flair (will probably even lag your system if you enabled all) but it makes me feel like a rockstar (even though I'm actually not).

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jeffblanco profile image
JeFFBlanco

Great topic! 😎

Some nice hidden gems:

Extension Desc
JSON Tree View Handy way to navigate beefy JSON
Markdown Table Format Markdown table formater
Calculate Great for scratchpad / notes
Git Lens Super charged Git functionailty
Highlight Bad Chars Very helpful for pesky encoding issues
Sort Lines Sort lines of text
Unique Lines Keep unique lines of text; remove dupes
Time Converter Converts various timestamps
Base 64 Base64 encode/decode
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cubiclebuddha profile image
Cubicle Buddha

if you like calculate, you'll love Quokka

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adambraun profile image
Adam Braun • Edited

This isn't really an extension, but I use it very often.
I was looking for something equivalent to Sublime's panel focus, and there's a key map option, but it's not set to any key by default:
View: Maximize Editor Group and Hide Side Bar (shift + alt + enter)
View: Reset Editor Group Sizes (ctrl + shift + alt + enter)

Maximized editor group

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obahareth profile image
Omar Bahareth • Edited

Read Time

It shows an estimate for how long it takes to read your Markdown.

EDIT
Picture is taken from this tweet (I hope that's ok)
mobile.twitter.com/John_Papa/statu...

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zooly profile image
Hugo Torzuoli • Edited

Using Shades of Purple theme, with Material Icon, looks awesome! ESLint, Vetur and Angular Snippets for the programming part.

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ahmadawais profile image
Ahmad Awais ⚡️

🦄 Shades of Purple :) woohoo!

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zooly profile image
Hugo Torzuoli

You did an awesome work on this theme!

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ahmadawais profile image
Ahmad Awais ⚡️

That's very kind of you to say! 🙌

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Nick Taylor

Didn't your theme hit like 1 million downloads or something with about 1/2 million installs? 💯👏

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ahmadawais profile image
Ahmad Awais ⚡️ • Edited

🎉🎉🎉 Yes. So happy about it. And my VSCode Power User course hit 5,000 devs. Both huge milestones for a full-time open source developer like me. :)

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themafro profile image
Matthew Francis

vscode-spotify

Lets you control Spotify from within VS Code by adding controls and currently playing in the status bar.

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kosich profile image
Kostia Palchyk

Vim
github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim

tutorial1

tutorial3

Not recently though, been using it for years 🙂