Helpful VS Code Extensions!
So what are VS Code extensions? According to Visual Studio, “Extensions are add-ons that allow you to customize and enhance your experience in Visual Studio by adding new features or integrating existing tools. An extension can range in all levels of complexity, but its main purpose is to increase your productivity and cater to your workflow.”
Awesome! Features ✔️ Productivity ✔️✔️ ✔️
You can browse and install extensions from within VS Code. On the left of your VS Code, if you navigate to the extensions tab (circled in yellow below), this will show you a list of your installed and other recommended extensions. Each extension in the list includes a brief description, the publisher, the download count, and the rating. You can click on the extension item to display the extension’s details page where you can learn more.
Be sure to read through the extension’s overview as this provides important information such as uses, additional features, and which program it can be used with.
To install an extension, click the Install button. Once the installation is complete, the Install button will change to the Manage gear button.
Now to the fun stuff… the extensions!
1) Bracket Pair Colorizer
This extension allows matching brackets to be identified with colors. The user can define which characters to match, and which colors to use. By default (), [], and {} are matched, however custom bracket characters can also be configured. Hopefully with this, there will be no more bracket stragglers!
2) GitLens — Git supercharged
This is a super helpful extension to help you keep track of the git changes made by you and your team. This extension provides information with who, when and which lines of code have been changed.
3)Colorize
Colorize helps you instantly visualize the colors in your css program.
But another awesome feature….
What if you want a specific shade of blue or red or green and you don’t know the RGB color value?! Well Colorize can probably help you! You can toggle to adjust the exact color you’re looking for.
4) Code Spell Checker
If you’ve become heavily reliant on autocorrect like me and can no longer spell even basic words, this extension could be your life saver! Code Spell Checker is a basic spell checker that works well with camelCase code. The goal of this spell checker is to help catch common spelling errors while keeping the number of false positives low (**sadly cannot be used for ruby files).
Misspelled words would appear with a squiggly underline (as shown below). You will first need to click on the misspelled word and a lightbulb icon will appear. From there, click on the lightbulb icon and a list of suggested words will populate.
5) TODO Highlight
As you can probably tell from the name, this extension is great for highlighting the comments in your code and categorizing them. The extension already has built-in keywords like FIXME and TODO, but you’re also able to add more keywords and style them as you like!
Hope some of these extension may have helped increase your productivity!
