Pimp My Visual Studio Code
Diary of an Indie Game Developer: Chapter 53
I’ve always been fascinated by the software tools people use and the ways in which they use them. I’m pretty nerdy about it, too. I’m the kind of guy who loves to see screenshots of people’s desktops and the home screens on people’s phones. What apps do they use? Can you tell which apps are most important based on the way they chose to layout their app icons?
My nerdy fascination with tools and workflows really knows no bounds. I’m also interested in stuff like what shortcuts people place on their shelves in Maya. Here’s a quick look at mine, in case you’re interested:
Where things get really nerdy for me though, is when we start talking about code editors, which brings us to Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.
Unity ships with Microsoft’s free version of Visual Studio on both Windows and the Mac. It’s the default way to write code for Unity and as a result, I would assume that most Unity developers use it. I don’t. I use Visual Studio Code.
Why?
I prefer Visual Studio Code mostly because of how configurable it is. There are a gagilion free extensions that allow you to customize Visual Studio Code to really suit your particular workflow preferences.
One of my favorite extensions is “eppz!” which is a C# theme built specifically for Unity. It has distinct colors for Unity classes and types and I think it looks really nice:
Another extension I really like is “C# FixFormat”. I’m really OCD when it comes to consistency in code formating. If I decide I like my opening and closing curly braces to always be on their own separate lines, then I want to make sure my code is written that way consistently. Unfortunately, human error is a thing, so it’s easy for little inconsistencies to creep into my code. Oops! Accidentally left an opening curly brace on the same line as my method declaration:
That’s where C# FixFormat comes in. I just hit Shift-Alt-F, and my whole script gets checked for inconsistencies, and then C# FixFormat fixes them:
Sweet!
Another extension I should mention is “Unity Code Snippets”. What it does is give you IntelliSense like auto complete for common Unity methods:
Very helpful!
This next one is just eye candy, but I really like it: “vscode-icons”. It’s a pack of nice icons for items in your Visual Studio Code sidebar:
Last but not least, I’m also a total font nerd. I absolutley love typography. My brother and I used to try to guess which font they used whenever we watched the credits at then end of a movie, so it probably won’t surprise you to learn that I’m very particular about the fonts I use to edit code. Right now my favorite font for code is SF Mono which is the font that Apple made for Xcode. If you’re on a Mac and you want to use it in Visual Studio Code, you can find it here:
/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app/Contents/Resources/Fonts
Just navigate to that folder. Then, select all the fonts. Open them, and install them. Once you’ve done that, back in Visual Studio Code, add SF Mono to your Font Family settings. I also like to set my Font Weight to bold:
With bold SF Mono and the eppz! theme, my code looks like this:
So, that’s how I’ve pimped out my Visual Studio Code. Do you guys know of any other must have extensions that I’ve missed? If so, please let me know in the comments below. Thanks!
See you next week…
