15 VS Code Extensions Every Developer Must Know

For a developer, research and experiments are the main keys to their success. The experiment is only carried out in a lab with its equipment, so for a developer, an IDE is the lab, and an extension is equipment. It depends upon you to choose the best lab and equipment. This blog will help you out to choose the best one.

A good lab should be the one that is easy to organize and simple enough to understand, and VS Code is the one.

VS Code is an awesome code editor that you can’t ignore. It is one of the most popular code editors among developers, especially web developers. It is lightweight, free, and open-source. VS Code has a very simple and easy-to-understand interface. And one of the best thing which makes it popular is that it is developed and maintained by Microsoft using Electron. VS Code has a wider community of active developers and extensions, which speed up the development process.

Now, I think you have chosen your lab. So, it’s time to gather the equipment. Here are some best VS Code extensions that are specially designed to improve the developer experience and performance.

1. ESLint

ESLint is one of the useful tools for developers. It is a code formatter and helps developers spot errors in ECMAScript/JavaScript code. It statically analyzes the code to find out bugs.

You can preprocess the code, use custom parsers, and write your own rules that work alongside ESLint’s built-in rules. You can customize ESLint to work precisely the way you need it for your project.

2. Prettier

Prettier is an opinionated code formatter. With Prettier, you can clean up the codebase by pressing the magic key, and the code is formatted. It enforces a consistent coding style across your entire codebase.

3. Quokka.js

Quokka.js is a productivity tool for developers for rapid JavaScript / TypeScript prototyping. It makes learning, prototyping, and testing the code blazingly fast.

Its result gets updated immediately, console logs, expression values, and error messages are displayed inline. Also, it has live code coverage, value explorer, CPU profiling, and many more.

4. Bracket Pair colorizer

Bracket Pair colorizer allows matching bracket pairs to be identified with colors. You can also define which tokens to match and which colors to use by default (), [], {} are matched. However, custom bracket characters can also be configured.

5. Gitlens

GitLens is a powerful, feature-rich, highly customizable, and open-source extension with supercharging Git capabilities. It simply helps you better understand the code. You can seamlessly navigate and explore Git repositories, version history and gain valuable insights via powerful commands.

6. Setting Sync

Setting Sync is an open-source and free-to-use extension. It syncs the setting files, launch file, snippets folder, workspace folder, etc.  It allows easy to upload and download files with auto-upload and auto-download features.

Setting Sync also allows you to share your setting and show a summary page at the end with details about config and extensions affected. It will make very handy when you switch to a new environment; instead of configuring everything from the start, you can sync between your VS Code environments.

7. JavaScript Code Snippet

JavaScript Code Snippet provides code snippets for JavaScript in ES6 syntax for VSCode editor. It supports both JavaScript and TypeScript. All the snippets include the final semicolon(;). It has tons of code snippets that boost the development process.

8. Browser Preview

Browser Preview is one of the most helpful extensions. It enables the real browser preview inside the editor that you can debug. It is powered by headless chromium and works by starting a headless Chromium instance as a new process. The browser can either be Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge.

Browser preview also allows having multiple previews to open at the same time. This enables a secure way to render web content inside VS Code and enables exciting features such as in-editor debugging and more!

9. Polacode

Polacode is a way to polaroid your code.  It allows you to take a customizable screenshot of your code. It will enable resizing the snippet or container by just dragging the lower-right corner of the snippet. You can also control image appearances by changing the font, color, theme, background color, shadow, and many more. It proves to be very useful when explaining or creating tutorials.

10. Remote SSH

Remote SSH is one of the most useful extensions for developers. It lets you use any remote machine as your development environment through an SSH server. You can access any file or folder on the remote machine and work on it just like you would work on your machine. Also, you can quickly swap between different, remote development environments and safely make updates without worrying about impacting your local machine.

Through Remote SSH you can Access an existing development environment from multiple machines or locations. Since this extension runs a command and other extensions directly on the remote machine, no source code needs to be on your local machine to gain its benefits.

11. Live Share

Live Share allows you to edit and debug the project or a file collaboratively in real-time. It also enables you to pair with your teammate to solve the common problem and work together on the same code. With your codebase, you can even share your terminal, server, localhost web apps, and audio with other users.

12. Visual Studio IntelliCode

Visual Studio IntelliCode extension provides AI-assisted development features to developers. It gives AI assistance for Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, and Java developers, with insights based on understanding your code context combined with machine learning. It is built to help the developers and programmers with smart code completion suggestions.

13. Better Comments

Comments are most important for the developers and programmers. And it is better to have clear, descriptive, and easy-to-understand comments. So, the Better Comments extension allows you to create more human-friendly comments in the code. You can categorize each annotation separately, like alerts with red, TODOs with yellow, and many more. And It enhances the readability of the code.

14. SQL tools

One of the most useful extension as you can manage the database via VSCode. It supports a dozen of drivers like MariaDB, SQLite, AWS Redshift, etc. It provides features including query runner, query history, IntelliSense, bookmarks, connection explorer. You can even generate INSERT queries too using the SQLTools extension.

15. Markdown All in One

Every developer and programmer maintain documentation or README of the project or file. So, this extension makes it very easy to take care of all the markdown needed, such as auto-preview,  shortcuts, table of contents, and more. It is lightweight, simple, and has cross-platform usage. It also increases your productivity and helps to maintain the code documentation easily.

Conclusion

All the above 15 VS Code extensions will help you become a better programmer and boost your productivity without affecting the performance of your code.

There are many other extensions out which are also good. So, now it’s your turn to tell us which of these VS code extensions are you going to install? Do you use any extensions that you would like to recommend? Then write us in the comment section below.