10 Extremely Helpful Visual Studio Code Plugins for Programmers

Whether you’re an experienced developer or just starting out, you want your development work to be as easy as possible. Using the right tools can help you achieve this goal. If you’re using VS Code, 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 the content you want. The plugins you use will have a big impact on your work efficiency and workflow. That’s why we have the VS Code plugin list. We change tools, and tools change us. - Jeff Bezos

These plugins can all be found for free on the Visual Studio Marketplace.

1. Visual Studio Intellicode

With over 3.2 million downloads, Visual Studio Intellicode is one of the most downloaded plugins on the VS Marketplace. And in my opinion, it’s one of the most useful plugins out there. This plugin is designed to provide intelligent code completion suggestions to developers and comes pre-built with support for multiple programming languages. Using machine learning technology and patterns found in many open-source GitHub projects, the plugin provides suggestions as you code.

2. Git Blame

Sometimes you need to know who wrote a piece of code. Well, Git Blame comes to the rescue, telling you who was the last person to touch a line of code. Most importantly, you can see which commit it happened in. This is very useful information, especially when you’re using something like feature branches. With feature branches, you can use the branch name to reference a ticket. Because Git Blame tells you which commit (and therefore which branch) a line of code change was made in, you’ll know which ticket caused the change. This helps you understand the reason behind the change better.

3. Prettier

Prettier is one of the best plugins that developers need to follow a set of good rules while developing. It’s a remarkable plugin that lets you take advantage of the Prettier package. It’s a powerful, self-proclaimed 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 to help you format your code correctly.

4. JavaScript (ES6) Code Snippets

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

5. Sass

You may have guessed that this plugin can help developers who are using style sheets. Once you start creating style sheets for your applications, you definitely want to use the Sass plugin. The plugin supports indented Sass syntax automatic syntax guidance, autocompletion, and formatting. In terms of style, you definitely want to include this tool in your toolbox.

6. Path Intellisense

Path Intellisense is one of the Visual Studio Code extensions that provides guaranteed productivity boosts for your development. If you’re working on many projects at once and using too many different technologies, then you certainly need a convenient tool that will help you remember path names. This plugin will save you a lot of time that would otherwise be wasted on finding the correct directory. PathIntellisence was originally developed as a simple extension for autocompleting file names, but it has since proven to be a valuable asset in most developers’ toolkits.

7. Debugger for Chrome

If you need to debug JavaScript, you don’t have to leave Visual Studio Code. 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 that quickly finds problems. Most of the problems found by ESLint can be automatically fixed. The ESLint fixer recognizes syntax, so you won’t encounter errors introduced by traditional find-and-replace algorithms. Most importantly, ESLint is highly customizable.

9. SVG Viewer

The SVG Viewer extension adds many utilities that can be used with SVG in VS Code. This plugin makes it possible to render SVG files and see what they look like without leaving the editor. In addition, this plugin also has options for converting to PNG and generating data URI schemes.

10. Themes

Last but not least, themes. Since you’ll be looking at your editor every day, why not make it as beautiful as possible? There are a plethora of custom plugins that can change the color scheme and icons of the sidebar. Some popular themes are free, such as OneMonokai, OneDarkPro, and Material Icon.