25+ Visual Studio Code Extensions That Are Worth Installing

Home

About

Articles

Visual Studio Code is a code editor that has me falling head over heels for full stack development all over again. Visual Studio’s younger sibling, Visual Studio Code is built using the Electron framework, is open source and was recently announced as the default development environment at Facebook. It’s no surprise that it’s now the most popular development environment according to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2019 . Controversially, it’s predicted to be on track to replace Visual Studio one day.

I was hesitant to install Visual Studio Code in the beginning. If it’s built on Electron, it’s essentially a web app, right? HTML, CSS and JavaScript under the hood. How could that be worth using over the heavyweight that is Visual Studio? Where as Visual Studio is known as the ‘heavyweight’ for Microsoft centric development, Visual Studio Code couldn’t be more different. Visual Studio Code adopts the slimline approach of .NET Core ; only including the essentials and enabling the user to tailor their experience to specific requirements.

With the help of the developer community as well as the Visual Studio Marketplace , a user can install extensions to enhance the features available in Visual Studio Code. In addition to features, extensions can also be useful for enabling Visual Studio Code to support programming languages such as TypeScript , Python , Java , Ruby , Go , PHP , Objective-C and many more.

As much as I was hesitant to use Visual Studio Code, I was reluctant to install too many extensions. Why? I was happy to use one or two to get the job done and didn’t want to bloat my code editor with extensions I never used. What changed my mind? I was investigating a defect in TypeScript and after a few hours I was tearing my hair out! I asked a kind developer on my team to pull the feature-branch to their development environment and within 2 minutes they had identified the issue. I was amazed! One of their installed extensions ( TSLint ) had highlighted the issue and suggested a quick fix.

As I began exploring more extensions, I thought I’d share those I came across that are worth installing and may save you those crucial few hours in your development time.

Please note: If you have any suggestions for an extension that is missing from this list, please let me know at @kiltandcode and I’ll update this article.

Icon

Title

Author

Description

ESLint

Dirk Baeumer

Integrates ESLint JavaScript into VS Code

JavaScript Booster

Stephan Burguchev

Boost your productivity with advanced JavaScript refactorings and commands

JS Refactor

Chris Stead

Automated refactoring tools to smooth your development workflow

node-readme

bengreenier

A vscode extension to view javascript module documentation in editor

npm Intellisense

Christian Kohler

Visual Studio Code plugin that autocompletes npm modules in import statements

Debugger for Chrome

Microsoft

Debug your JavaScript code in the Chrome browser, or any other target that supports the Chrome Debugger protocol

Debugger for Firefox

Firefox DevTools

Debug your web application or browser extension in Firefox

Bracket Pair Colorizer 2

CoenraadS

A customizable extension for colorizing matching brackets

Indenticator

SirTori

Highlights your current indent depth

Path Intellisense

Visual Studio Code plugin that autocompletes filenames

XML

Red Hat

XML Language Support by Red Hat

Beautify

HookyQR

Beautify javascript, JSON, CSS, Sass, and HTML in Visual Studio Code

vscode-icons

VSCode Icons Team

Add useful icons based on file types to the Explorer view

GitLens - Git supercharged

Eric Amodio

Visualize code authorship at a glance via Git blame annotations and code lens, seamlessly navigate and explore Git repositories, gain valuable insights via powerful comparison commands, and so much more

GitHub Pull Requests

GitHub

This extension allows you to review and manage GitHub pull requests in Visual Studio Code

Capitalize

Viable lab

Capitalize titles according to The Chicago Manual of Style

Markdown All in One

Yu Zhang

All you need to write Markdown (keyboard shortcuts, table of contents, auto preview and more)

Code Spell Checker

Street Side Software

Spelling checker for source code

Word Count

Word count for Markdown documents

Paste Image

mushan

Paste image directly from clipboard to Markdown

GistPad

Live Share Contrib

VS Code extension for managing and sharing code snippets, notes and interactive samples using GitHub Gists

Todo Plus

Azad Ratzki

Create and manage TODO comments with enhanced functionality

Partial Diff

Ryuichi Inagaki

Compare (diff) text selections within a file, across files, or to the clipboard

Permute Lines

earshinov

Reverse, Unique, Shuffle lines as in Sublime Text

PowerShell

Develop PowerShell scripts in Visual Studio Code!

SQL Server (mssql)

Develop Microsoft SQL Server, Azure SQL Database and SQL Data Warehouse everywhere

IIS Express

This allows you to run the current folder as a website in IIS Express

Have you ever wondered if you could use the .NET CLI and Visual Studio Code to build a new .NET application, instead of relying on Visual Studio to do all of the heavy lifting? Read more

RSS