10 Extremely Helpful Visual Studio Code Plugins for Programmers

10 Extremely Helpful Visual Studio Code Plugins for Programmers

Whether you are an experienced developer or just starting your first job as a junior developer, you would want to make your development work as easy as possible. The right use of tools can help you achieve this goal. If you choose to use Visual Studio Code as your IDE, you can make it fit your preferences by installing the right plugins. To make your life as simple as possible, you can add a lot of what you want. The plugins you use will have a big impact on your work efficiency and the way you work. This is why we use the Visual Studio Code plugin list. We change tools, and tools change us. - Jeff Bezos

Please note that all of these plugins are available for free on Visual Studio Marketplace.

1. Visual Studio Intellicode

Visual Studio Intellicode is one of the most useful plugins you can use, and it is one of the most downloaded plugins on Visual Studio. This plugin is designed to help developers provide intelligent code completion suggestions and has support for multiple programming languages built-in. Visual Studio Intellicode uses machine learning techniques to observe and find patterns used in numerous open-source GitHub projects and provides suggestions while coding.

2. Git Blame

Sometimes you need to know who wrote a piece of code. Git Blame comes to the rescue, telling you who touched a line of code last. Most importantly, you can see which commit it happened in. This is great information, especially when you use something like feature branches. When using feature branches, you can reference tickets by the branch name. Because Git Blame tells you which commit (and therefore which branch) a line of code was changed in, you will know which ticket caused the change. This helps you understand the reasons behind changes better.

3. Prettier

Prettier is one of the best plugins for developers to follow a set of good rules while developing. It is a prominent plugin that allows you to leverage the Prettier package. It is a powerful, opinionated code formatter that allows developers to format their code in a structured way. Prettier works with JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS, Markdown, GraphQL, and other modern tools, allowing you to format your code correctly.

4. JavaScript (ES6) Code Snippets

Every web developer has possibly used various JavaScript stacks. Regardless of which framework you choose, typing the same common code in different projects should reduce your workflow. JavaScript (ES6) Code Snippets is a convenient plugin that provides some very useful JavaScript code snippets for idle developers. It binds standard JavaScript calls to simple hotkeys. Once you master the trick, your work efficiency will be greatly improved.

5. Sass

You may have guessed it, this plugin helps developers using stylesheets. Once you start creating stylesheets for your application, be sure to use the Sass plugin. The plugin supports indented Sass syntax automatic setup, autocompletion, and formatting. In terms of styling, you definitely want to include this tool in your toolkit.

6. Path Intellisense

Path Intellisense is one of the Visual Studio code extensions that can guarantee productivity boost for your development. If you work with many projects at once, use too many different technologies, then you definitely need a convenient tool that can help you remember directory names. This plugin will save you a lot of time that would otherwise be wasted on finding the right directory. Path Intellisence was originally designed as a simple extension to autocomplete filenames, but it has since proven to be a valuable asset in most developers' toolkits.

7. Debugger for Chrome

You don't have to leave Visual Studio Code if you need to debug JavaScript. The Chrome Debugger released by Microsoft allows you to debug source files directly in Visual Studio Code.

8. ESLint

The ESLint plugin integrates ESLint into Visual Studio Code. If you're not familiar with it, ESLint is a tool for statically analyzing code to quickly find problems. Most problems that ESLint finds can be automatically fixed. The ESLint fixer recognizes syntax, so you won't run into errors introduced by traditional find-and-replace algorithms. Most importantly, ESLint is highly customizable.

9. SVG Viewer

The SVG Viewer extension adds many utilities to use SVG in Visual Studio Code. This plugin makes it possible to render SVG files and see how they look without leaving the editor. Additionally, this plugin also has options for converting to PNG and generating data URI schemes.

10. Themes

Last but not least are the Themes. Since you see your editor every day, why not make it look as beautiful as possible? There are many custom plugins that can change the sidebar's color scheme and icons. Some popular themes are free, namely One Monokai, One Dark Pro, and Material Icon.