A tour of my Visual Studio Code environment 👨💻
It's been a while since I last made a post. Work has been very busy over these past few months and I've been working on some other stuff as well. But today, I wanted to do something a bit different. I wanted to give a tour of my Visual Studio Code (VSC) environment.
You might see something that you like or something you didn't know that was possible with VSC. If you take a look at the Stack Overflow developer survey results for 2019 (as seen here), VSC is the most popular IDE out of all respondents. And with good reason, Microsoft provides lots of support to the product and there is a huge community as creating extensions, themes and icon packs.
Anyway, enough talk let me show you a screenshot of my VSC environment!
##The theme - Monokai Pro (with the Ristretto filter applied) - Paid extension So I've been looking for a theme that's easy on the eyes and has a great set of icons to go with it. I stumbled across Monokai Pro one day and decided to buy a licence. Since then, I haven't looked back. Monokai Pro offers 6 filters and I personally use the Ristretto filter myself as I find whatever I'm working on easier to read.
Monokai Pro costs €9.95 and you can check it out on the official website by clicking here!
If you want to use a free theme, there are plenty available on the VCS extension marketplace, including:
Dracula Official - click here
Material Theme - click here
And for a free icon pack, you can try vscode-icons - click here
##The font - JetBrains Mono - Free font
If you're looking at code for a long period of time, you need a good font that's designed for reading code, support for different font weights etc. I often find that I needed to zoom in when using some fonts such as Consolas. But then JetBrains decided to release an open source font called JetBrains Mono (which is used in their own products).
I think this font is fantastic and use it wherever I can (I even use it as the default font in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code at work!)
I find that the code is easier to read and nicer to look at.
Since this font is free and open source, you can use it anywhere!
Give it a shot, you can find it here!
##The code formatter - Prettier - Free extension
In my job I work with JSON and XML a lot, and when I'm working on my other projects I tend to work with Markdown (which is what I use to write blog posts!) as well as JSON and XML. I've found that sometimes you need to format these into something more readable.
Which is why I use Prettier!
Prettier is a free extension that allows you to format code for a variety of different formats including YAML, TypeScript, GraphQL and more.
Even if you don't use VSC, Prettier is available for a wide variety of code editors.
You can get Prettier here!
##The GIT extension - GitLens - Free extension
It wouldn't be a developer environment without having a GIT extension of some kind right? I decided to use GitLens and it's a fantastic GIT extension for VSC.
The side bar can show you the repositories you have, the commits that have been made, a file history, search and compare commits and more!
It's free to use and it's open source.
You can find GitLens here
##The runner - Code Runner - Free Extension
Sometimes you just want to run your code in your editor either it be a code snippet or a project. For that, I use a free extension called Code Runner. Code Runner supports a wide variety of languages from Python to Fortran. It's an interesting extension and it's completely free
You can check out Code Runner here
##And so much more!
One of the stand out features of VSC is there is a huge library of amazing extensions out there. Not just themes, fonts and icons but support for languages as well. There are so many extensions out there which I haven't mentioned here. I'll have to start making a 'VSC extension of the week post' in the future to cover some of my favourite ones!
If you want to see the most popular extensions on the VSC marketplace, click here!
Thanks for reading! 👋
