My VSCode Setup

This post was originally posted to my blog.

Since there are posts like this going around on blogs like The Zen of Programming and DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻 so I feel like giving my 🔥 take.

VSCode: Themes

My current theme is Gloom because it's pretty and has the best balance of contrast and coolness.

I also have the standard Monokai, Cobalt2, nightowl, and level-up-vscode-theme which is my second favorite.

Extensions

I have a lot of extensions. Let's just get that out of the way (I just installed 6 more while writing this).

   

Yep. 115 extensions.

   

Some of my favorite extensions:

Random Extensions

• Bracket Pair Colorizer
• Dash
• File Utils
• vscode-spotify
• WakaTime
• Path Intellisense

React/Redux

• React/Redux/react-router Snippets
• Typescript React code snippets
• ES7 React/Redux/GraphQL/React-Native snippets
• React Pure To Class
• vscode-gatsby-snippets
• vscode-styled-components-snippets

CSS/SASS

• Color Info
• Color Highlight
• SCSS IntelliSense
• IntelliSense for CSS, SCSS class names in HTML and Slim

JavaScript

• JavaScript Booster
• JS Refactor
• Promise snippets

Git/GitHub

• Git Extension Pack This consists of:
  • Git History (git log)
  • Project Manager
  • GitLens
  • gitignore
  • Open in GitHub / Bitbucket / VisualStudio.com
• Gist Extension

Testing/Linting

• JavaScript Unit Test snippets
• Jest
• Prettier - Code formatter

Final Thoughts

VSCode has come a long way from when I first tried it in 2015. I use it exclusively now, and am extremely happy with it and happy with my overall setup, though I could get rid of some of these extensions.

Comments

[Thomas Landin]

VSCode is pretty intelligent about only loading what you need. E.g. when writing JavaScript it won't load Python extensions. Assuming the extension registers itself properly as being language specific and not as being a general extension.

Though at 100+ extensions I imagine startup is sluggish due to update checks etc.

[tiff]

A lot of these also come in extension packs which I really like. I'd like to uninstall some of them, but I can't because they are required by the extension pack. Of course, I could just stop using those, however I've found them useful.

[Thomas Landin]

Yeah many are probably global, but from the examples posted all the React, JS, and HTML/CSS ones are language specific.

I'm not sure how the snippets extensions work but if they tie into the existing snippets function they won't add any bloat since it's just some additional entries in a lookup table.

[Nick Taylor]

I've been loving Night Owl as well ever since Sarah Edo published it. Before that I was all about the Cobalt 2. So far I haven't switched back though. I just find the theme more soothing to my 👀

Looking forward to your next post!

[Devin W. Leaman]

There are a few extensions in here that I hadn't heard of before, and I'm glad to have found them! Most specifically, the vscode-spotify, Dash, WakaTime, and the JavaScript Booster extensions, so thank you for sharing!

[tiff]

Not really. Haha. But I have deleted some of them, since then.

[Shan Khan]

Settings Sync extension is also good!

[Sagar]

Recently I found one great extension for console.log.

Extension name: wrap console.log