As is well-known, Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a powerful, lightweight code editor available for free on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It’s one of the most popular code editors coming with a robust set of features out of the box. The capabilities of VS Code can be extended, which in return will enhance your working productivity in many ways.
Let’s go over the top 10 VS Code extensions and how they can make coding life easier for any web developer!
1. ESLint
As JavaScript is, in its nature, a loosely typed language, it’s more prone to errors. Each developer has their own style of writing (i.e., naming conventions or single and double quotes for a string). ESLint allows you to impose specific guidelines for developers to stay with coding standards and minimize the chances of errors. ESLint is an extension that helps you find and fix problems with your JavaScript code.
This extension aims to make your code more consistent and bug-free. It uses static analysis to identify and highlight problems within your JS code as you type. Most of the issues can be fixed automatically by ESLint, every time you save your file. You can even add your own custom rules or disable existing ones.
2. Prettier
In addition to ESLint, you can use Prettier to format your files when saving them or committing them to a version control system. It formats your source code for you, so you don’t have to worry about it. You can use the extension for personal projects and when working in a team with other developers.
It helps you enforce consistent styling across the whole codebase, maintaining proper alignment and giving spaces between the words in the code, enhancing the overall readability and maintainability of both small and large code. Developers looking at the code will effortlessly understand the logic and structure.
Prettier supports various languages (JavaScript, TypeScript, JSX, Angular, Vue, CSS, HTML, JSON, GraphQL), and it is used by many big companies like Facebook, Spotify, Discord, PayPal, and others.
3. Path Intellisense
Linking correct file paths for your CSS and other assets has never been easier. As the name suggests, the Path Intellisense extension helps you autocomplete filenames and their paths. This simple but powerful extension can index both the working directory and remote drives. When you divide your code into multiple modules, this comes in very handy.
Whenever you start typing the file name, Path Intellisense will begin to search for that name in your project and give you suggestions. It makes it easier to work with lots of node modules or files.
4. ES7+ React/Redux/React-Native snippets
When working on a React project, “snippets” will help you improve your workflow and code pace by providing neatly packaged and pre-written templates for you to use. All you have to do is start typing the trigger commands.
By simply typing “rfce” as a command, the extension will generate a React functional component for you, import React, and export the component.
This extension can be used for React and also for React-Native projects. It’ll give you many snippets for React that you’ll find helpful and speed up your development process. Apart from React, it also has snippets for Redux and GraphQL.
This is a trendy extension with a few million downloads and a 5-star rating.
5. React Refactor
Every once in a while, some of the codebases will require refactoring. When working on large projects, this task could become problematic, and that’s when React Refactor tool comes in.
With a couple of clicks, it can extract parts of JSX code to a new functional component. It might not be as helpful for large components, but it is perfect for any small ones. It has support for TypeScript and TSX, and it’s compatible with React Hooks API. This extension works well with the classes, functions, and arrow functions.
6. GitLens
The purpose of GitLens is to help developers navigate and understand how their code is changed over time. Working with git from the console can be difficult, depending on what you want to achieve. The main feature is the ability to visualize who, why, and how changed the lines of code in the past. You can navigate through the history of file changes back and forth. Among many other features, it can inspect a single line in the code, show you the last commit that modified it, and provide you with a link for the pull request in which that change was made. The extension is also highly customizable.
7. Live Server
If you are working on website development in VS Code and need to visualize your work so far, you can use Live Server. It creates a local and temporary server just for the website being developed. You can visualize both dynamic and static website pages using this extension.
- Live and reloadable browser-based web server for website visualization.
- Users can stop or start the server with a single click from the status bar of the add-on.
- Compatible with Chrome Debugging Attachment.
8. npm
If you work on JavaScript projects, you must try npm as the package manager. Now, when you need to shift your work to VS Code editor, you can do that. Because the npm extension lets you enjoy the npm supportability on VS Code editor like other IDEs.
- Recalling the last npm script that you used after installing this extension.
- Run an npm script
- Terminating any running scripts
- Run npm install
9. CSS Peek
Do you want to get rid of having to toggle over to your .css file to inspect the properties attached to an id or class? You need to try the CSS Peek add-on for VS Code. It lets you view the hover image of CSS code from the HTML file.
The extension also converts IDs and class names into hyperlinks. Thus, when you click on these hyperlinks, you can instantly access the ID definition and class of your CSS.
10. HTML and CSS Support
HTML CSS support visual studio code
The Extension Highlights
- HTML id and class Auto-completion features.
- Upholds connected and implanted templates.
- Support layout legacy.
- Upholds extra templates.
- Support other HTML-like coding languages.
- Approves CSS selectors on request.
How to Use HTML and CSS Support extension?
You can see a rundown of id and class suggested ideas by pressing ctrl + space.
Happy Coding!
This concludes our list of top ten VS Code extensions that we think provide the most boost to developers’ performance, speed, and accuracy. Hope they help you produce amazing work!
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Top comments (5)
I'd totally recommend the VSCode Essentials extension pack as a base for any kind of setup you want to go for.
it has some incredible customization extensions for anything like UI settings, macros, version control tools and much more. Then build your custom coding environment starting from there.
Hi There,
That's a great extension!! Thanks For Pointing Out!! I had limited the Article to the Top 10 Extensions in my opinion so didn't include it.
Do let me know to all the viewers and commenters, if you want another Article consisting of more Top 10 VS Code Extensions or any other software.
I believe VS Code has path intelisense built-in
Yes, You are Right, but the inbuilt VS Code Intellisense only supports Javascript and few more languages.
Also this Extension is not Developed by Microsoft but commonly used. It helps with Intellisense in Other Programming Languages as well.
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