The Ultimate Cheat Sheet on C++ Extensions for Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is an extremely popular editor. Besides its clean UI, this tool comes with tons of extensions (also known as plugins) and flawless code highlighting. You can improve your coding experience greatly with hundreds of extensions for Visual Studio Code. In addition, you can also take advantage of VSCode to learn about what are the best C++ extensions for Visual Studio code Reddit or about visual studio code extensions. All these writing tips are at your disposal. Equally, Visual Studio Code is one of the most advanced IDEs available on the market today. It boasts an array of features such as: easy compilation, intelligent code analysis, and much, much more.

Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code is a free and open-source text and source code editor that is available for Windows, Linux, and OS X operating systems. The software appears to be a cross-platform alternative to programs like Notepad++ and Sublime Text. 

Without delay, let us take a look at this list of all the C++ extensions that are available for Visual Studio Code.

How to Add an Extension in Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code comes packed with many features. There are many extensions for adding more features like coding intelligence, easy compiling, etc.

So, extensions in Visual Studio Code are pretty simple to add. Just follow the three simple steps below.

  1. First, click on the Extension icon on the left side of the window when in your VSCode software.
  2. Second, search for the extension you want from the Search bar.
  3. Finally, select the extension and click Install.

Now that you know how to add extensions to Visual Studio code, let’s take a look at some helpful extensions.

Prettier – Code Formatter

The Prettier editor allows you to format code. The extension will automatically format your code in an easy-to-read and aligned manner for you as you save your document. 

Moreover, Prettier can be used for any programming language. It is used by many developers and has more than 13,357,765 active installations. Prettier is an opinionated code formatter. It enforces a consistent style by parsing your code and re-printing it with its own rules that take the maximum line width into account, wrapping code when necessary.One of the advantages of using a code formatter like Prettier is that it can be configured to format your code in a specific way. For example, you can tell Prettier to use a semicolon at the end of every statement, or you can tell it to use single quotes instead of double quotes.Another advantage of using Prettier is that it makes your code easier to read. By formatting your code in a consistent way, it becomes easier for others to understand what you are doing.Prettier is not perfect, but it is a great tool for helping you format your code in a consistent and readable way.

Visual Assist

This is an extension developed by Whole Tomato, which provides a number of useful features to boost productivity. These include autocomplete, automated refactoring, code generation, and debugging. The software has a reputation for providing unsurpassed functionality in reducing code complexity as well as producing code at a rapid pace. Assuming you would like content for the subheading “Visual Assist” in the context of the blog article “Visual Assist”: If you’re a visual learner, then chances are you learn best by seeing things explained step-by-step. That’s where Visual Assist comes in!Visual Assist is a tool that allows you to see step-by-step instructions for how to do something. It can be used for anything from learning how to cook a new recipe to fixing a broken appliance.One of the great things about Visual Assist is that it doesn’t rely on text alone. Instead, it uses both images and text to explain things clearly. This makes it ideal for those who are visual learners or who prefer to learn by doing.If you’re looking for a way to improve your understanding of complex topics, then Visual Assist is definitely worth checking out!

Among its features, you can find:

  • Navigation.
  • Refactoring.
  • Coding assistance.
  • Code generation.
  • Code understanding.
  • Code correction.
  • Code inspection.
  • Debug assistance.

C/C++

C/C++ is a high-level, general-purpose programming language that was developed in the early 1980s. C++ was designed to be an extension of the programming language C, and it quickly became one of the most popular programming languages in the world.C/C++ is used in a wide variety of applications, including operating systems, scientific computing, embedded systems, and software development for a variety of platforms. The popularity of C/C++ means that there is a large and active community of developers who are continually improving the language and developing new tools and libraries.If you’re looking to get started with C/C++

The C/C++ extension for Visual Studio Code is useful for people who write C/C++ code because it provides C/C++ support, IntelliSense, debugging, and code browsing.

The extension has been developed by Microsoft and is used by a lot of C/C++ developers. The extension has been installed more than 20,892,240 times.

ReSharperC++

There is a more advanced version of Visual Assist called ReSharper that only works with C++. It is a powerful tool that allows you to improve the quality of your code, to transform it, and to organize long lines of code in a more efficient manner.

ReSharper C++ is a very good program, especially because of its navigation style. This makes it much easier for the programmer to deal with errors in the code and to make them better.

Additionally,the C++ version of the old .NET extension created by JetBrains is also available. It is a similar extension to Visual Assist (Jetbrains has also written a piece on the comparison between the two) offering a number of productivity tools such as on-the-fly code analysis and quick fixes, search and navigation capabilities, code completion and refactoring options, as well as a number of other features that can help increase your productivity at the office.

Resharper helps Visual Studio C++ users to:

  • Analyze and improve the code quality.
  • Identify usages and navigate the code.
  • Refactor and transform the code in accordance with the changes made.
  • Generate a common code base.
  • Run and manage unit tests.
  • As well as using a consistent coding style.

CodeMaid

As the name suggests, CodeMaid helps clean up your code. In addition to simplifying code, it organizes code and formats it consistently in order to remove unnecessary whitespaces. Additionally, it provides navigation/digging capabilities that allow rearranging the code for improved navigation. 

With this in mind, these are additional capabilities of Code Maid:

  • Code cleaning
  • Code digging
  • Code reorganizing
  • Comment formatting
  • Joining
  • Finding
  • Sorting
  • Collapsing
  • Progressing
  • Configuring
  • Switching
  • Toggling

Code Runner

Code Runner is another extension you can use to run C or C++ code. You can run your code from VS Code using this extension. You simply need to hit the ‘Run’ button and it will run the code in the terminal.

Additionally, Code Runner can also be used with other programming languages, such as Python and Java. It has more than 7,920,877 active installations.

FastFind

FastFind, as its name suggests, is a tool that enables one to navigate through the code by finding texts within files. It has the ability to automatically update your code every time you write complex codes. It further has a feature called Jumping, which allows you to jump to and from header files. In conclusion, if you are a C++ programmer, it’s a good idea to go for FastFind.

Code Compare

This is a tool for comparing and merging files and folders that supports multi-directional merging and provides the following:

  • Modified, inserted, and deleted text is displayed in colored blocks.
  • Changes within lines are highlighted in detail.
  • Unchanged text regions may be collapsed (Pro-feature).
  • Point-and-click merging.
  • The ability to edit files on the fly.
  • Advanced users can also utilize the merging shortcuts.

C/C++ Extension Pack

The C and C++ extension pack provides an additional set of tools for developing C and C++ in order to extend the development environment. It has been developed by Microsoft and it will be necessary to have this because it brings to you additional functionality that will enable you to make a better development.

This extension pack is used by a large number of developers. It has over 626,388 active installations.

Sonarlint

The Sonarlint extension supports C#, C++, C, VB.Net, and JS. This feature is used to find out if your program has a bug in it and to ensure that it (your program) is of high quality. It is primarily there to analyze your program in a thorough manner and then to locate the bug in it.

If you are someone who does a lot of complex and lengthy coding, this can be a great help to you. So, I would recommend downloading Sonarlint. 

Backtrace Crashpad Integration

Backtrace is an error-capture tool, whose slogan is “Ship better code faster” (we already love it!).In essence, it is essentially a platform for error management that helps you detect and address crashes and exceptions as soon as they occur. Using this Visual Studio Extensions, you will be able to install and integrate Crashpad error captures into Windows C++ development easily. This will allow you to capture crashes and then save them to your Backtrace instance. In other words, it simplifies the process of reporting crashes.

Besides, a tool like this can be crucial for developers who are working with open source code and have a lot of work on their hands in order to compile the source code for integration into their applications.

Among the many features Backtrace provides you may find:

  • An easy to use wizard for adding Crashpad binaries to builds and ensuring that the right binary is being used automatically.
  • Editable template files for Crashpad.
  • A script for post-build processing.

C/C++ Snippets

C/C++ snippets is our next extension. This one provides C and C++ snippets while writing code and autocompletes the code. This makes it easier to write fast code and improve productivity.

If you are a C/C++ developer, you need to use the C/C++ Snippets extension. It is widely used by over 553,747 active installations.

Incredibuild

Those who are well versed in C++ Visual Studio and would like to learn about Incredibuild’s solution should take note. It addresses the painful issue of slow compilation time (which is very common for compiling in C++) and speeds up the entire development cycle by up to 30X faster!

Incredibuild reduces time-consuming tasks like builds, tests, code analyses, and more, by distributing these across machines in the local network or public cloud, thus reducing these tasks’ completion times by up to 90%. Moreover, the icing on the cake is that Incredibuild’s solution includes a revolutionary build visualization tool that replaces the text output with an intuitive graphical UX which can be accessed by anyone.

C/C++ Advanced Lint

C++ Advanced Lint is a static analysis extension for C/C++ that supports a number of back-end analyzer programs. This program is used for the linting of the C/C+ code on save, which makes it very useful for the development of C/C+ code.

As a result, the C/C++ Advanced Lint extension is a well known and useful extension that has been downloaded by many developers. It currently has more than 212,394 active installations.

C/C++ Themes

Microsoft developed this C/C++ theme extension specifically for C/C++. It provides colorization, file icons, and more. It has both light and dark modes so you can choose what you want in terms of color and fonts if you so wish.

Conclusion

Visual Studio Code is a very effective tool for C++ developers. This software is extremely helpful for maintaining multiple projects and improving our productivity by automating various components of our software development process. With the introduction of Visual Studio Code, C++ developers now have the best extension platform for enhancing Visual Studio Code, whether you are working on the Mac or a Windows PC.

It is well known that Visual Studio Code has one of the best community-developed repositories for C++ extensions available. A number of useful features are integrated into this software such as snippets, a code navigator, code analysis, and warnings. In fact, one of the key features of this IDE is that you can open any project in it directly without installing it on your computer. You may find out more about its features if you read Visual Studio Code Review.

Finally, these C++ extensions are meant to make your life easier if you are a C++ developer using Visual Studio. This list contained the best extensions for Visual Studio which are C++ compatible. I have found the best way to find out whether or not an extension will work for you is to test it out for yourself. Eventually, you won’t be able to imagine life without it. 

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