Top 5 Visual Studio Code Extensions
3 min · 544 words
Is this an easy post to make? Sure, but it’s an important one, especially if my mind eraser frog is used against me.
Anyways, here’s a list of my favorite VSCode extensions.
- Path intellisense
- This is so incredibly handy. I mean, all of them are, but still. It’s hard to remember paths, so this is a must have anytime I’m having to
import {something} from 'some/path'.
- This is so incredibly handy. I mean, all of them are, but still. It’s hard to remember paths, so this is a must have anytime I’m having to
- Code Runner
- Ever since I found this, I basically never use codepen or anything similar. I’m always trying out things in JS before implementing anything in any actual project. This is way easier than making a dummy node project and running it via the terminal. So handy.
- change-case
- I use this way more than I care to admit. I don’t exactly know why, but I just happen to come across a lot of stuff in PascalCase that should be camelCase or vice versa. This handy tool allows me to highlight all of the offenders and change them easily.
- Document This
- I have a secret. I’m a developer that likes documentation. This extension helps me document my functions and such quickly and easily. No maintenance programmer ever complained about too much documentation, and we love our maintenance programmers. 🙏 You all are doing the lord’s work.
- Indent rainbow
- Tabs or spaces? Just kidding, I don’t want to start World War 3 here. However, whether you use one, the other, or both, this extension lets you see how far down the rabbit hole you’ve gone at a glance. It’s especially handy when you’re 3000+ lines and 4 nested objects deep in a JSON file.
Honorable mentions
Here’s a few that I use, but if I was on a stranded dev box without these, I could survive…I just wouldn’t like it as much.
- Relative path
- This is super helpful if you haven’t setup your tsconfig to use a baseUrl yet, which you should do, but I get it. Legacy projects exist sometimes.
- Conventional commits
- I was forced to use conventional commits at a previous job. At first, I hated it, but over time, I grew to respect the process and madness. Conventional commits are so handy for organizing your commits, and change logs are a breeze now.
- TODO Highlight
- This one and the next one help me locate messages from my past self easily. Ideas come while you’re doing other things, so a quick “TODO: Don’t forget to do this!” can go a long way in helping you remember various things, specifically refactors in my case.
- Todo tree
- This is a nice side bar in VSCode that shows you all of your TODOs, and hopes and dreams you left behind in your codebase. Don’t neglect them!
- Dracula theme
- I was chasing a good theme for a long time. Sometime in the mid 2010s I found my soulmate in the Dracula theme. My terminal, VSCode, JetBrains IDEs, and tons more are using this theme. It’s widely available and, thanks to the site, very easy to use in more than just your code editor.
What are some of your favorite VSCode extensions? Let me know in the comments below. Thanks for reading!