Why I switched over to Visual Studio Code?
Before I knew anything about Visual Studio Code, I had used Sublime Text, Brackets, Notepad++ and Atom at different degrees of depth. A colleague showed me Visual Studio Code (VS Code) 3 years ago. I thought nothing of it at the time, especially as it was developed by Microsoft and that put me off. I guess I was happy mixing it up with using Sublime Text and Atom due to different teams favouring a particular editor or just wanting to see what the shiniest editor had to offer. However, it would be nice to only have to work with one text editor.
It wasn’t until I started working with C# and I had the opportunity to use Visual Studio 2017 on Windows that I started appreciating the benefits of features such as automatic syntax error checking and code completion. After this I began craving a free IDE that I could use on mac with similar functionality. I noticed that the latest web development courses started using VS Code and that’s when I decided to give VS Code ago.
Out of the box, there are a lot of features to be enjoyed like IntelliSense (code completion features that makes coding more convenient), debugging and integrated terminals for running gulp, node and built-in git. People who are big fans of Emmet will be happy to know that Emmet support is built right into VS Code with no extension required. For those who don’t know, Emmet is plugin for many popular text editors which greatly improves HTML and CSS workflow when building sites.
Also, there are regular monthly updates in contrast to the other popular IDEs which shows it is well supported.
In addition, there is a site called Visual Studio Marketplace which shows the featured, most popular, and trending extension packages.
Or you can search within VS Code which is really handy and easy to install:
The extensions I like are:
- Vscode-icons — it makes it fun and easier to identify the many types of files you have in your workspace and gives it a nicer explorer experience.
- ESLint — a tool for analysing your code for potential errors.
- Live Server — enables you to launch a local development server with reload feature for dynamic and static pages which is great for personal projects.
- Prettier — makes your life easier by formatting code for you automatically.
- Bracket Pair Colorizer — a customizable extension for colourizing matching brackets.
At Beamly and in my personal projects, the majority of developers use VS Code which helps with consistency and efficiency in pair programming as we don’t have to figure out how each other’s IDEs work. Hopefully, this blog post has been helpful in showing you some useful tools and might start you on the path to using VS Code. I am personally still discovering new things with this IDE.
What’s your favourite extension for VS Code? Or what alternative IDEs are you using?
Please share them in your comments.
If you enjoyed reading this, we’d love to hear from you. And by the way, we’re growing our Product & Engineering team! If you’re passionate about creating cutting-edge consumer experiences and building scalable solutions, come join us by visiting https://www.beamly.com/#section-join-us.
