I’m sure that you know that Visual Studio is one of the best IDE for development. It’s great for writing codes and debugging them as well as writing codes and publishing. As you probably know, extensions are really important parts of Visual Studio. If they’re not available, we can’t discover all the keys of Visual Studio. These famous visual studio extensions may help us discover more about Visual Studio.
Visual Studio Code is a great tool if you are developing websites with HTML, CSS, and/ or JavaScript. The default features of VS Code are quite extensive so there aren’t many extensions needed to get started. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some great add-ons already built-in.
Extensions to your IDE are invaluable to speed up your work without reducing the quality of your output. Considering Visual Studio Code is the most popular IDE, These extensions mostly apply to web developers, but there are some general-purpose extensions that will benefit everyone else too.
Let’s take a look at some of the best extensions for VS Code.
GitLens
GitLens is an open-source extension that combines the capabilities of Git with VS Code. This is a powerful extension that allows you to see who, why, and how lines of code have changed over time, it helps you to visualize code authorship at a glance via Git blame annotations and code lens, seamlessly navigate, and explore Git repositories, and a whole lot more.
Benefits: This helps you to better understand your code, allows you to effortlessly explore the history and evolution of a codebase.
Settings Sync
Before you start installing extensions left and right, it’s good to know of the existence of Settings Sync. It allows you to sync pretty much everything you customize on VSCode to Github, from settings to keyboard shortcuts to other VSCode extensions.
This way, you’ll have access to your preferred IDE from whichever device you want, instead of having to program from a vanilla VSCode environment on new devices or having to manually set up everything again.
Auto-Close Tag
Using this tool is non-negotiable, every developer needs to use this in their vscode toolbox, it will not only catch possible ‘stupid’ errors but it is very handy, you really don’t have to spend your precious energy thinking about the small stuff like making sure you don’t forget to close your tag.
It has over 4 million downloads for a reason.
You can install it directly through your VSCode.
Visual Studio IntelliCode
This extension aims to aid developers and programmers with AI-assisted code completion suggestions. It comes with default support for Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, and Java.
Benefits: Saves you time by putting what you’re most likely to use at the top of your completion list.
javascript, typescript, python, artificial intelligence, javascript react
Live Server
This is one of my favorite extensions. Live Server launches a local development server with a live reload feature both for static and dynamic pages.
Every time you save your code, you’ll instantly see the changes reflected in the browser. You’ll be much faster at spotting errors and it’s much easier to do some quick experiments with your code.
Terminal
Terminal with over 853,296 downloads.
Terminal by Jun Han, the same writer for auto-close tag and auto-rename tag. VSCode already has its built-in terminal where you can just open using ctrl+` for mac users.
But it includes some shortcuts to speed up things, check out these features:
- Run all the commands in Text Editor
- Run the selected commands in Text Editor
- Stop the running commands
- View output in Output Window
- Open Integrated Terminal at the current file’s directory
- A quick way to toggle Integrated Terminal
You can install it directly through your VSCode.
Prettier
Prettier is an opinionated code formatter that enforces a consistent style by parsing your code and reprinting it with its own rules that take the maximum line length into account, wrapping code when necessary.
Benefits: Having consistent formatting and styling across your code can save a lot of time, especially when collaborating with other developers.
Remote – SSH
The Remote – SSH extension lets you use any remote machine with an SSH server as your development environment. This makes it much easier to develop and/or troubleshoot in a wide variety of scenarios.
You also don’t need any source code on your local machine, because the extension runs commands and other extensions directly on the remote machine.
Bracket Pair Colorizer
With over a 4.5Million downloads.
Bracket Pair Colorizer is also a must-have tool in your VSCode toolbox.
For beginners, this may not make sense right away but if you are working on bigger projects where functions and components become very complicated, a bracket pair colorizer is here to help you.
Its primary function is to make sure every bracket you created will automatically pair its closing bracket so you won’t need to have a hard time finding which closing bracket is which.
And yes, you’re welcome!
You can install it directly through your VSCode.
Better Comments
Better Comments allows you to create more human-friendly comments in your code, categorizing your annotations into alerts, queries, TODOs, highlights, etc.
Benefits: clear and digestible code will save lots of time for you and also for your team
formatter, typescript, javascript, cleancode, python
Git History
Similar to GitLens, Git History is a VSCode extension that gives a visual of the git log. No longer should you look through the git log in the terminal.
The extension is quite comprehensive as well. It allows you to compare branches, commits, and files across commits. You can also lookup Github avatars, which is quite neat.
Path Intellisense
With over a 4.2Million downloads.
Path Intellisense can help with auto-completion for the imports or path after calling a component, for example, and trust me, it helped me big time.
Why do we have to memorize the file’s entire path, it is just a waste of resources, when this tool can just do it for you?
You can install it directly through your VSCode.
Debugger for Chrome
The debugger is a VS Code extension to debug your JavaScript code in the Google Chrome browser or other targets that support the Chrome DevTools Protocol. It helps to debug eval scripts, script tags, scripts that are added dynamically, and set breakpoints, including in source files when source maps are enabled.
Benefits: detect errors earlier on in the development process, gain useful information of data structures and allow easy interpretation.
debugger, chrome, javascript, code quality, devtools
CSS Peek
This extension is invaluable for front-end developers. Inspired by a similar feature in the IDE Brackets, CSS Peek allows you to extend your HTML and ejs file to show CSS/SCSS/LESS code within the source code.
It also allows you to quickly jump to the right CSS code if you know the class or ID name.
Javascript ES6 Code Snippets / Snippets
With over a 4.88Million downloads.
An extension every Javascript developer must have.
It comes with pre-built support not just for Javascript ES6 but also for Typescript, Reactjs, Vue, and HTML.
Snippets are pretty awesome actually, wherein you don’t have to write the same starting template over and over when you can just type like 3 letters and boom the entire for example HTML structure shows up.
You can install it directly through your VSCode.
Live Share
Visual Studio Live Share enables you to collaboratively edit and debug with others in real-time, regardless of what programming languages you’re using or app types you’re building.
Benefits: instantly and securely share your current project, share debugging sessions, terminal instances, and more
debugger, collaboration, remote, clean code, code editor
Peacock
Here’s a cute one. Peacock allows you to change the color of your Visual Studio Code environment, so you can quickly identify which instance you’ve just switched to.
Conclusion:
Web development extensions that will help you do your job faster. Developing a website may include a lot of time-consuming work, therefore they need to be as effective as possible. They should also be easy to use and user-friendly, because website developers may not be absolutely familiar with all programming languages they use.
Extensions for Visual Studio Code automatically customize the program to suit your purposes, which provides additional functionality without switching between multiple programs or looking up commands or help documentation.