Top 10 VS Code Extensions You should know

Visual Studio Code had 2.6 millions monthly active users in 2017 (last official number I could find, certainly more by now) and is the arguably the best code editor out there at the moment. One of the best features is the Market Place offering tons of extensions to customize it exactly to your needs and helping you in writing high quality code. In this article I will recommend 10 VS Code extensions for front-end engineers working with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and frameworks like VueJS or ReactJS (This list is not in order of their importance)

1. NPM

Every developer knows NPM - the Node Package Manager. This extension helps you to manage your Package.json, provides warnings if dependencies are not installed yet and helps with version control.

2. Prettier

Prettier from Esben Petersen is a pretty neat extension that has been downloaded close to 14 million times already. It helps you formatting your code and provides color keywords for more readable code.

3. JavaScript Code Snippets

This extension was created by Charalampos Karypidis and has been downloaded 4.5 million times so far. It provides Code Snippets for writing JavaScript, Typescript, React, Vue, HHTML, … and supports ES6 syntax.

4. CSS Peek

CSS Peak helps you when working markup language class strings and IDs by identifying and enumerating the different styles that are already applied. This comes handy because you no longer have to jump between HTML and CSS files.

5. Vetur

Vetur is the official VueJS Extension and was downloaded more than 20 million times already. It provides error checking capabilities, auto-completion features and provides Vue snippets. This is really cool if you are a Vue developer like me!

6. ESLint

ESLint - what can I say. Many people love linting, many do not. But the value linting provides for clean code is hardly arguable and this extension with 24 million downloads is the best tool for it if you develop with JavaScript.

7. Live Sass Compiler

The Live Sass Compiler extension is a small but powerful tool that can compile your SASS/SCSS files to CSS files in real time and provide a live preview of the compiled styles in your browser.

8. Debugger for Chrome

Chrome for many developers is the number one browser when it comes to developing, testing and debugging there code. With this official extension for VS Code you can do so directly from Visual Studio Code - how cool is that!

9. Live Server

Live Server by Ritwick Dey who also created Live Sass Compiler creates a local development server right in Visual Studio Code to serve your static and dynamic sites. Using the go-live button in your editor you can serve your code right away and the extension also supports live reloading - neat!

10. Beautify

Last but not least in this collection comes Beautify, another great extension for code formatting much like Prettier. Almost 12 million downloads speak for themselves and you can format code written in JavaScript, JSON, CSS, Sass and HTML.

Conclusion

This collection is far from being complete and the extensions are not necessarily the best but I hope it provides you with some very good tools to help you writing high quality code and become a better web developer. Let me know in the comments if you find something useful or have other suggestions for extensions you think are first class.

#visual-studio #web-development #javascript #node-js