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Breno Alves
Breno Alves

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Bare minimum setup on VSCode to work on TS/JS projects

There are plenty of VSCode Extensions on the marketplace but which one is necessary when it comes to working with TS/JS projects?

I'll cover the bare minimum extensions to work on a well-established TS/JS project and some extras which I find very helpful in my day-to-day tasks.


Eslint

When it comes to working with others developers in environments where we need to keep consistent code, we need to have something to make sure everyone is following certain rules and Eslint does exactly this.

To use this extension you need to install Eslint on your project as a development dependency and a configuration file.

npm i -D eslint
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you can find some good examples of configuration files at Eslint docs

Prettier and EditorConfig

Those two tools work alongside Eslint to help developers format and follow all patterns established.

To use Prettier you need to install it as a developer dependency and create a prettier config file (docs)

npm i -D prettier
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and for EditorConfig you will need to create an editorConfig file as well (docs)


Extras

Package Json Upgrade

This extension is very helpful when you need to easily visualize which package you can upgrade and which versions are available

Package upgrade view

Dev Containers

Dev containers is very helpful when working with docker containers.

Github Copilot

I can't put in a few words how much this is helpful nowadays... if you are not aware of what copilot is please check out some videos on youtube about it.

Top comments (3)

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Joe Mainwaring • Edited

Definitely informative, thank you for posting, although I will share that I thought the context here would be different. This is more of a "Bare minimum setup to work on TS/JS Projects", I had clicked on the headline thinking you were going to discuss VSCode plugins and settings.

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Breno Alves

I was thinking about going through VSCode settings indeed but I thought it would get longer than I wanted it. I might write another article about it separately :) thanks for the feedback

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Jonathan Cardoso

Excellent article, very direct and complete.