Recommended VS Code Extensions

So cool
West Cliff

Visual Studio Code is my code editor of choice. I regularly use Linux, MacOS, and Windows, and it is very nice to have a consistent tool between each operating system. I have listed my recommended VS Code extensions below. In this post, I talk about general development tools I like to use in each operating system.

  • GitLens — Git supercharged
    Awesome parsing of the project’s git information. This extension pulls in the git history and blame from the project, and can show git history on the highlighted line.
  • change-case
    An easy way to change the case of selected text.
  • Code Spell Checker
    A regular spell checker. It’s smart enough to parse most words separately in a variable name.
  • IntelliSense for CSS class names in HTML
    Auto-completion for CSS names based on existing rules.
  • Path Intellisense
    Path auto-completions.
  • Docker
    Useful tooling for Docker.
  • ESLint
    The de facto Javascript linter.
  • Excel Viewer
    Can parse CSV as a table.
  • Markdown All in One
    Shortcuts and tooling to help write Markdown in the VS Code editor. My personal favorite utility here is creating and keeping an up to date a table of contents based on the header structure.
  • Live Server
    An easy way to launch a server from inside the project.
  • Todo Tree
    Helps organize TODOs so they don’t get lost.
  • Live Share Extension Pack
    This is a really powerful paired programming tool. It works and is cross-compatible Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, or in a browser (the session host has to use Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code).

Angular

  • Angular Essentials
    A pack of extensions maintained by John Papa, one of the celebrities in the Angular world. I have found this to be a comprehensive set of extensions for Angular, especially since I don’t use snippets much.

C#

  • C#
    This is the official C# extension from Microsoft and handles everything including syntax highlighting, IntelliSense, and debugging. It is a dogfooded tool and it shows.

Settings

In addition to the above extensions, I have some settings I configure in Visual Studio Code:

  • CodeLens for Javascript and Typescript. This parses projects for class, method, and property references and shows them above the class/method/property declaration. It does cause slight slowdown when loading a file, but I consider it a worthy tradeoff.
  • Breadcrumbs. These show file path breadcrumbs above the editor window.

If I find any other recommended VS Code extensions, I will add them here.

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