Work Smarter

5 min readAug 18, 2022

If you’re like me, then you are always trying to find a way to make the things you do easier. What’s the saying? Something about working smarter not harder? Or like Bill Gates says, “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job, because a lazy person will find the easiest way to do it.” Welp, I’m not going ahead and calling anyone lazy, it was just a fitting quote to make the hard things simpler. Now, let me show you some of my favorite lazy extensions you can install to your Visual Studio Code to help improve your work flow and your environment.Visual Studio Code Extensions

Tabnine

If you’re relatively new to coding (like I am) then this tool won’t be of too much use yet, nonetheless a great tool to have. Tabnine is a personal AI assistant to help you with your code. Meaning, the more you code, the more it learns about you. It works with existing patterns in your projects and offers predictive code autocompletion.

Auto Rename Tag

When writing HTML it can get congested quick, tag names start to look blurry, finding the end tag becoming more and more difficult. Auto Rename Tag comes in handy whenever you wish to change a tag name, for example you want your <h2> tag to be a <p> tag. With Auto Rename Tag, as soon as you change the opening or closing tag, it will update its partner accordingly.

Prettier

The name Prettier is pretty self-explanatory. It simply makes your code prettier. When you format your code with Prettier it will assist you with your tabs, and help clear up unused space giving you a solid, clean code to read and work with.

Better Comments

As I’m beginning my coding journey, I’ve realized that I find myself making tons of comments throughout my code. Comments are important for a wide variety of things: describing exactly what your code is doing, pointing out errors, saving code to use later, or maybe even just talking to yourself (I find myself chatting myself up in the comments when I’m stuck with an error). Better Comments let you color code comments using their four identifiers: highlights ( => {green}), TODOs (console.log(orange)), queries (color ===(blue)), and alerts(error(red)).

Code Spell Checker

I know I’m not the only one who has experienced the struggle of not being able to figure out why your code isn’t running, only to realize you forget the ’n’ in co_st. This simple but effective debugger tool helps identify words that you might have misspelled with the goal of keeping false-positives low.

Turbo Console Log

Oh yeah. This one hits different. I sometimes wonder how much time I spent during a project simply just typing out the words console.log(). Turbo Console Log is an extension that lets you simply highlight what you want to log and then press ctrl + alt + L (Windows) or ctrl + option + L (Mac) and TCL will automatically console.log it on the following line.

Git Graph

Git graph does an excellent job of displaying your Git Repository’s inner content. You can see each individual commit and which branch is doing what. On top of that, you can even run certain commands such as merging or creating branches.

Live Share

Saving the best for last. Maybe not actually the best, but I just think this one is fun to use with colleagues. This one isn’t as much as a helper tool as it is just a useful tool for collaborating. Live Share lets you share a link of your VS Code to another person and they can literally jump on your VS Code and code alongside you simultaneously. You can chat to each other and real time see what edits they are doing.

Google Chrome Extensions

Grepper

Ahhh, Google, the metropolis of information, a coder’s safe place. Grepper isn’t a VS Code extension but a Google Chrome one. When you google code syntaxes, examples of code, or how to use a certain function, Google will display a list of sites related to that search. With Grepper, the top result will actually be code that other Grepper users can vote up or down based on relativity.