Over the last few years Visual Studio Code has taken over the programming communities by storm, quickly becoming the most used editor for programmers in the world. One of the strengths of Visual Studio Code is it comes with a plethora of extensions (or plugins) to boost productivity and simplify things easier for the programmers.
There are plenty of resources listing the best of Visual Studio Code extensions. However, they tend to have the same extensions listed over and over again. While this is expected – because these extensions are wonderful – I thought it would be nice to list some less-known extensions here, just to be a little different 😊 I mainly work with JavaScript/HTML/CSS, React, Java and Flutter.
Extensions
Here are 8 of the little-known extensions in no particular order.
Colonize
This extension helps programmers to add semicolons at the end of the line, which is super helpful when you are working with programming languages such as JavaScript and C# where each statement ends with a semicolon.
With a keyboard shortcut, the semicolon can be added to the end of the current line regardless where the cursor is. This way you don’t need to move the cursors manually to the end of the line and type semicolon. While this might sound trivial, it has increased productivity for me.
The GIF below is from the extension’s page:
Find Word At Cursor
I often find myself needing to look for the same variable or word in the file I am editing. While there are many ways to quickly do that, I found this extension is really easy to use: I simply need to place the cursor on a word I am looking for, then press the F3 key, and I can jump from word to word very quickly. For example, in the following GIF, I simply click on the F3 key to jump around the same word “href”.
Font Switcher
I often change programming fonts, and this extension allows one to quickly switch fonts without having to manually update the Visual Studio Code configuration files. And the best thing is, it allows the developers to preview what the fonts look like, as the GIF below shows:
Wrap Selection
I wish I discovered this extension right at the start of using Visual Studio Code. This extension allows you to wrap a selection of text with any symbol. It is super useful, especially when working with JSON and strings, where selected texts can be easily wrapped with quotation marks. It is a true time-saver.
The GIF below is from the extension’s page:
Image Resizer
This extension allows the developers to resize images right from the context menu. It keeps everything simple and straight-forward: click on an image, give it the size dimension, and that’s it – a new image file is created right there. Nice and simple, no need to use another app or website to resize images.
gitignore
When developers work on projects, there are almost always files and folders that need to be excluded from the Git repository. You can use this extension to simply right-click on a file or folder on the Visual Studio Code sidebar and add it to the .gitignore file, so that you don’t have to manually edit it.
Goto Last Edit
In Visual Studio Code, you can go back to the previous edited location (hold CTRL + K then CTRL + Q on Windows). This extension allows you to go back in history to more than just one last edited location. And you can also keep going back and forward between the locations. There are some similar extensions in the Visual Studio Code Marketplace but this extension works best for me.
Change Color
Here is another extension for colours. This one allows you to quicker convert colours between RGB, HEX and HSL formats right inside Visual Studio Code, without the need to go to a converter website.
The GIF below is from the extension’s page:
Themes
Themes are extensions made to customise the look-and-feel of Visual Studio Code. All the themes listed here are dark themes.
Brackets Dark Pro
Brackets is another text editor made for programmers, particularly for the front-end programmers. It is made by Adobe and is quite beautiful. This theme attempts to mirror the look-and-feel of the default dark theme in Brackets.
Pitch Black Theme
This theme is truly dark – it is pitch black! It is one of the most pretty dark themes I found.
Darcula Theme
Darcula (note, it is not Dracula) is the dark theme from Intellij IDEA by Jetbrain. Coming from Jetbrain, you know the theme is going to be high quality. This theme mirrors that. While there are several other Darcular themes in Visual Studio Code, I found this one to match closest to the Intellij theme based on my JavaScript and Java setup.
Dark Feminine Italic
This is a lovely theme designed towards female programmers. It has some sort of “dreamy” feel to it. The colours are quite gentle, in my opinion, and are not too bright or overpowering.
