Popular Extensions of Visual Studio Code

Did you know that Visual Studio Code has held first place among the most popular development tools for the last four years? According to the 2021 Developers Survey, 70% of the 82,000 respondents said they use VS Code.

And the thing that makes it so popular is the number of extensions available.

Faster, smarter, personalised

Visual Studio Code is the most popular open-source code editor. Simple yet powerful, it enhances productivity and speed, giving its users freedom and the ability to customise through VS Code extensions. These add-ons enable new features or integrate existing tools to cater to users' workflow and personalised experience. Microsoft is moving the power of the VS Code to the cloud with the support for 99% of extensions and all the languages.

Let's go through some popular extensions:

Settings Sync

This life-saving extension will allow syncing more or less everything customised on VS Code to Github, from settings to keyboard shortcuts to other VS Code extensions. It should be the first one installed.

Open VSX Registry

This is a vendor-neutral, open-source alternative to the Microsoft Visual Studio Marketplace for VS Code extensions. The difference between the Open VSX Registry and the Visual Studio Marketplace is that VS Marketplace licenses free extensions only for use with Microsoft VS products. Still, with the Open VSX Registry, developers have free and open access to VS Code extensions that can be used with any technology or tool that supports them. Furthermore, the Eclipse Open VSX source code is open to all, so anyone can adopt, adapt, and enhance it.

Todo Tree

Todo Tree does many things to increase your productivity, such as highlighting TODO, FIXME and BUG tags. It is also easier to list them and navigate through them.

GitLens

This extension allows users to see who, why and when have lines of code or a code block changed. GitLens gives insight into code history and how the code evolved. It is also highly customisable. In other words, it’s easy to turn off annotations or to change how they behave.

Better Comments

This extension makes it easy to add comments to the code, which are extremely helpful to developers, especially those working in teams. Adding different characters after a double forward slash // makes it possible to highlight text, put errors and warnings, add to-do lists, etc.

Prettier

Lastly, Prettier, one of the most popular code formatters, helps to keep code style consistent. It’s possible to set it up, so it formats the code every time it's saved, significantly reducing time spent. This extension works with the following technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, JSON, Angular, CSS, HTML, Vue, Markdown, and many more.

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