VSCode is an open-source, cross-platform editor that has become a favourite of programmers, particularly in the Web Development community. It’s fast, extensible, customisable, and has tons of features. You should check it out if you haven’t already done it.
Thousands of extensions have been made for VSCode. I am going to list a few extensions that I use on a day-to-day basis.
Let’s begin!
Quokka.js
Quokka.js is a rapid prototyping playground for JavaScript and TypeScript. What that means is that it runs your code immediately as you type and displays various execution results in your code editor. Try it yourself.
After installing this extension, you can press Ctrl/Cmd(⌘) + Shift + P to display the editor’s command palette, and then type Quokka to see the list of the available commands. Select and run the New JavaScript File command. You can also press (⌘ + K + J) to open the file directly. Anything you type in this file is executed immediately.
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Todo Highlighter
It often happens that you code a function, and think that there is a probably better way to do the same thing. You leave a comment // TODO: Needs Refactoring or something to that effect. But then you forget about the note and push your code to master/production. With Todo Highlighter, that won’t happen. Hopefully.
It highlights your TODOs/FIXMEs or any other annotation in your code in bright colours so it is always clearly visible. One nifty feature is List Highlighted annotations. It lists all the TODOs in the output console.
REST Client
As a web developer, we often need to work with REST APIs. For examining the URLs and checking the responses, tools like Postman are used. But why have a different app when your editor can easily do the same task. Welcome REST Client. It allows you to send HTTP request and view the response in Visual Studio Code directly.
Auto Close Tag and Auto Rename Tag
Since the advent of React and the traction it has gained in the last few years, HTML-like syntax in the form of JSX is all the rage now. We again have to code with tags JavaScript. Any web developer you would tell you that it is a pain to type the tags. In most cases, we need a tool that can quickly and easily generate tags and their children. Emmet is a really good example of this already built into VSCode. However, sometimes, you do just want something simple and concise. Such as an auto tag closer, which generates the closing pair of a tag as you type the opening pair. And when you change that same tag, the closing tag automatically gets changed. These two extensions do just that.
GitLens
As told by its author, GitLens supercharges the Git capabilities built into Visual Studio Code. It packs a surprising number of features such as code authorship shown via Code lens, commit search, history and GitLens explorer. You can read full explanations of these features here. Suffice it to say that you should install this plugin if you do any work with git.
There are other extensions that focus on a specific functionality. You can install those if GitLens feel bloated or you don’t use many of its features.
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