Getting the Most Out of Visual Studio Code

Over the past four years, I have been using Visual Studio Code (also known as VScode) as my primary text editor for coding.

The reason that Visual Studio Code appealed to me was it combined the strengths of both Sublime Text and IntelliJ IDEA which I had used previously. It was as lightweight as Sublime Text with the debugging capability of IntelliJ.

Over these past four years, I have spent a lot of time tweaking my setup for Visual Studio Code so I thought I would share what I have learnt in this post.

Change the default font

The first thing I want to talk about is changing the default font. The default font for Visual Studio Code is “Monaco”, which is a monospaced font (this means all the letters ocupy the same horizontal width) that is reasonably clear to read and looks as below.

The problem with “Monaco” is that it lacks ligatures, ligatures are where 2 or more characters next to one another render as a single glyph. As a developer ligatures can help the legibility of code when you are reading it quickly. If you compare the prior example to below, you can see that by using the…