The power of VS Code

I want to start with a couple of questions...

Are you using VS Code editor? Are you writing articles to dev.to? Or are you documenting your work/code with Markdown?

I assume that you will answer yes to all of my questions above. But...

Do you know that VS Code has built in support for Markdown?

If your answer is no I'll show you a nice tip. I'll reveal a secret. I'm kidding this is not a secret. It's in official documentation but I haven't read they earlier. If you've created some document and saved it with *.md extension you can trigger VS Code to show you live preview of that file. Only what you need to do is to press Ctrl+Shift+V and live preview will appear in new tab. In my opinion even more powerful is combination of buttons: Ctrl+K+V which end with side-by-side live preview. Now you can work comfortable on your next dev.to article.

Has you known about those shortcuts? If not just try to play with them. I hope this tip will be helpful to you.

Extras:

• More about Markdown and VS Code
• Notice if combination of Ctrl+Shift+V and/or Ctrl+K+V doesn't work please check if you saved file with *.md extension. Without that preview won't work.

At the end I want to tell you something funny. I want to tell you how I found this nice tip. I'm planning to work more with VS Code so I've printed a VS Code shortcuts cheatsheet. It's laying on my table. Today on during my daily stand up I wanted to eat a mandarin. By the way I know that's naughty. Juice from the fruit smudged paper next to this shortcut so that's the way I found it. It was next to me all the time and I didn't see it. Fortunately accident with mandarins caused that I found it.

Comments

[tiff]

I write most of my technical documentation and other GitHub related things in VS Code. I know it has built-in markdown support but I have a few markdown plugins to help with tables and autocomplete. Great article Rafal!

[Christian Vasquez]

Could you share which plugins are those? I would like to check them out :)

[tiff]

Yep! Markdown All-in-One, Markdown TOC, and Table Formatter.

These are just a few of the markdown utilities but these are the ones I most need.

[Jake Varness]

VS Code is awesome!! It's literally what I use for most things

[Rafal Pienkowski]

Me too and day after day I see more reasons to use this tool.

[Jithesh. KT]

Hey thanks for the tip. Little bit off topic : Can anyone suggest a good FTP file browser plugin for VC.?

[Sergio Corrales]

There's probably a better one out there, but this is the one I've used: marketplace.visualstudio.com/items...

[Patrick Tingen]

Gee, thanks for the tip, I was just searching for a nice md editor with live preview for my github project. Definitely worth exploring.

Oh and btw, mandarins are delicious indeed

[Rafal Pienkowski]

True. Mandarins are delicious,eating them is healthy and as in my case they can be useful.

[Carl Vuorinen]

Thanks for the tip.

And for anyone who is not into learning more keyboard shortcuts, you can also open it from the "command palette" (by pressing Ctrl+Shift+P and typing "mark...")

[Rafal Pienkowski]

Good point.

Here is cheatsheet which I'm using. It could help too.

[lukaszkuczynski]

Excellent mr Rafał. I was looking for something like this for a long time. Markdown support for N++ is OK, but the live preview that follows scrolling is cool! Thanks

[Rafal Pienkowski]

I'm glad to hear that. It's always darkest before dawn :)