Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a powerful, lightweight, most-used code editor available for free on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It’s one of the most popular open-source code editors with a wide range of extensions and robust features. VS Code extensions help in the automation of browser tests efficiently.
It is maintained by Microsoft and aims to offer all the tools needed to cut out the complex workflows of full IDE (Integrated Development Environment). You spend a lot of time in text editors, and still, every now and again frustrating issues appear that slow you down like taking longer to find the right file or finding a matching closing bracket. Thankfully VS Code extensions are there as a fixer for all these annoyances.
Visual Studio Code plugins are important in modern web development. Many programmers prefer VS Code because of its simple yet beneficial features that offer so many extensions for added functionality, languages, themes, productivity, debuggers, and tools to support development workflow.
Extensions are designed to improve the developer experience and make their job easier. Best VS Code extensions can make the coding life easier for any web developer by speeding up the development process and enhancing work productivity in various ways. Extensions provide additional functionality and improve the overall coding experience. They are full of shortcuts, popup texts, themes, icons, live servers, and much more, so these can be a lot of help to developers that will use them properly.
There is a wide range of useful extensions, some of which we will discuss here that every developer should utilize. VS Code increases your yield in terms of efficiency and productivity. The primary step in achieving the desired goal is using the right tools at the right time. No matter if you are a beginner or an experienced developer you will find these extensions useful and will help you enhance your development experience.
With this in mind here are a few valuable extensions in VS Code listed in the article that would definitely prove to be a lot advantageous in various ways. So let’s explore the top 10 VS Code extensions that would be worth keeping an eye on as a developer in 2022.
The LambdaTest VS Code Extension
There is a lot of interest found among developers to test their code and designs on desktop and mobile browsers as part of their development workflow, and LambdaTest is one such platform that aims to improve this to move forward.
LambdaTest is a secure, scalable, and reliable cloud-based cross-browser testing platform that allows you to get quick access to a wide range of browsers and minimize the time spent switching them. It also lets you review changes instantly and make the cross-browser testing experience faster and more efficient. You can also leverage the benefit of running parallel testing and usability testing on LambdaTest.
Using this platform there is no need for a complex setup of virtual machines, devices, and additional PC’s for testing websites. It allows you to select the operating system and browser combination you wish to test your website in. You can test in all versions of operating, Desktop including mobile and tablet devices such as iOS, and Android.
LambdaTest VS code extension allows users to preview and test their websites directly through Visual Studio. This Extension allows you to smoothly perform real-time cross-browser testing of your websites and web applications across 3000+ browsers, real devices, and operating systems with their combinations right from VS Code Editor.
The LambdaTest VS Code Extension also allows performing live-interactive testing, Geolocation testing across different screen resolutions. This extension for VS code also provides a local tunnel feature that allows you to test local or internal servers in our remote browsers including local folders across different desktop and mobile browsers containing HTML, CSS, PHP, Python, JavaScript, and other files on your local machine.
Snippets
Snippets are the best add-on for productivity and an excellent way to save time. This is a collection of various extensions for the most commonly used programming languages. Repeating the syntax for functional components every time when you create a new component can be quite tedious. Hence using snippets extensions you can create shorthands for things you do repeatedly
Some popular code snippet extensions are-Angular Snippets, Python, JavaScript (ES6) code snippets, HTML Snippets, Vue3 Snippets, etc.
Prettier
The Prettier extension is the most popular code formatter. Formatting is done by taking the maximum line length into account and wrapping code when necessary. This saves a lot of time mainly when working with other developers. It is easy to use. You just need to download it into VS Code and start using it.
Formatting code as you write it can be difficult. Prettier integrates with most editors and can even be adjusted according to need. It automatically fixes formatting issues in your code, like fixing the mix of single and double quotes or irregular use of semicolons. In case you don’t want to manually format the code each time, then it also allows you to change the settings from manual to automatically format the code just by hitting the save button.
It is a stable code formatter that helps to keep the code styling consistent across the whole codebase by analyzing the code and re-printing it with its own configurations. This takes into account the maximum line length, wrapping the code as needed.
More features you can implement using this extension are maintaining proper alignment and space between the words in the code and enhancing overall readability and maintainability of small as well as large code. So that the developers can effortlessly understand the logic and structure of the code just by looking at it. Besides, all the prettier ones also support many programming languages like JavaScript, TypeScript, Angular, Vue, CSS, HTML, etc. Big companies like Facebook, Spotify, PayPal, and others used it.
GitLens
GitLens is one of the popular open-source extensions for Visual Studio Code that combines the capabilities of Git with VS Code and allows convenience for any developer’s workflow, especially when working in a team. It helps the developers to navigate and understand how their code has changed in the past.
It helps you quickly understand the code. As developers, you may want to know who the authors of a file are, why, and when a line of code was written or changed. With GitLens you can effortlessly visualize git context via Git blame annotations and code lens to explore the history and evolution of a codebase straight in your VS Code files. It also lets you have access to revert, merge, and even rebase commits.
Other features GitLens extension include are-
- Revision navigation through the history of a file.
- A current line blame annotation on top of every file and on every line showing when was the last commit executed.
- A status bar blame annotation shows other information about the commit like the commit name, the author who last modified the current line, and when a commit was made.
Better Comments
Better Comments is a VS Code extension that helps developers to write human-friendly comments in their code. This helps more when working in a team or collaboration. Clear comments are not only beneficial for anyone (teams) going through the code but also for the developers themselves. Because even developers get lost in their own code when visiting it after some time.
Having descriptive and human-friendly comments can save a lot of time for you and your team. Better Comments extension attracts the developer’s attention by providing a colorful comment when used in a code block. Better Comments provide developers the ability to better document their code using a fully customizable system of tags. The extension gives a semantic context through the custom styling of colorful comment types. It also allows you to categorize your annotations into alerts, queries, to-dos, highlights, etc.
Path Intellisense
Path Intellisense is a simple but powerful VS extension that allows you to autocomplete file names and help you to easily type long path names. For example, if you start typing the path for a certain file, it automatically begins to search in your project and suggests the file names. This makes it more manageable to import files from different locations. Thus reducing the stress of recounting import paths and file names. In the case of an import expression, it removes the file extension by default. This results in speedy and productive work, which is very important.
Auto Rename Tag
Auto Rename Tag as the names suggest automatically renames the second tag as the first one is updated and vice versa same as Visual Studio IDE does. It is an excellent VS Code extension for web developers. Not only with HTML, this extension is very useful with React also.
In a real application, nested tags and elements make manual updates difficult and tiresome. Auto Rename Tag helps in saving time and preventing future runtime bugs.
Import cost
Import cost is a simple text extension that shows an estimated size of imports inline next to an import statement. Thus making you aware of how much space an imported module takes up. To provide an uncompromised user experience it is important not to import heft packages. To help you with that it keeps track of the size of additional dependencies in the code. If the import is too large, it alerts you by displaying the size in red. It also delivers immediate feedback when you change your import statements.
Using this extension you can create your own color scheme and configure what size to consider small, medium, or large according to colors. You can also select the type of bundle size you want to display
Bracket Pair Colorizer
Bracket Pair Colorizeris a VS extension that matches corresponding brackets in the code with the same color. Working with nested components, functions, objects, etc., in a file, with multiple parentheses, brackets, etc, can be confusing but using Bracket Pair Colorizer provides great help by coloring the corresponding parenthesis and brackets for easy navigation and accessibility. This makes it much easier for others to find matching pairs and understand the code.
Import Cost
As the name suggests the Import Cost extension helps with productivity by displaying the estimated size of an import package or required package in the editor. This helps to avoid issues by determining the size of added dependencies and the load time of your application.
If the import is too large, then this extension will warn you to reconfigure based on the requirements you set.
Conclusion
Higher efficiency, speed, and accuracy in the application development life cycle can be achieved only with the right tools. Above, we have reviewed the top 10 Visual Studio Code Extensions to help you on your journey in development. This will help you produce amazing work and boost performance, productivity, and accuracy over time.