The Best of 2022: Top 10 Visual Studio Code features We Released Last Year to Streamline Your Workflow

Get the most out of your Visual Studio Code  experience | Pieces for VS Code

The Pieces team had an incredibly productive year in 2022. Our Visual Studio Code plugin, as a core product, received updates throughout the year that delivered a host of new features. Each update was carefully crafted to deliver a more efficient, productive, and enjoyable development experience for you. We've taken into account your feedback and suggestions, and worked tirelessly to bring you the best possible solution for your workflow.

With so many new features and improvements, it can be hard to keep up. That's why we've put together this review of the top 10 new features released in 2022. This way, you can see what you might have missed and take advantage of the many benefits that come with using our VS Code plugin.

From powerful debugging tools to new language support, and everything in between, we're confident that you'll find something in this review that will enhance your development workflow. So, without further ado, let's take a closer look at the top 10 new features that will supercharge your workflow in 2023!

1 | Display Snippets Directly In Your IDE

In January 2022, the Pieces Team came up with a new version of Pieces for VS Code with the goal of making a developer's life easier. This release had a brand-new feature called the ‘Tree View’ in the Visual Studio Code Extension, which allowed saved snippets to be displayed directly in your editor. You could already save snippets using a "Save to Pieces" command prompt or by using keyboard shortcuts, but this release allowed you to hover over the snippet's name in order to preview it. With Tree View, all of the snippets became organized based on their language. To use a saved snippet, you simply had to click on it in the Tree View. This was a big improvement that got lots of users excited about what was coming next!

2 | Code Auto-Complete

The second major update of the year came in March, with Pieces for VS Code 0.1.4: Code Auto-Complete AND Code Reclassify!

This feature provided intelligent suggestions for code completion from the user's personal Pieces snippet repository as they typed. This made Pieces Auto-Complete the first tool that powers code completion suggestions from personal snippets instead of public repos; an amazing feature to have in early 2022.

Visual Studio Code | PFD Code Auto-Complete

3 | Code Reclassify

Another new feature in March was Code Reclassify. This allowed users to manually reclassify a snippet’s programming language right inside VS Code by right-clicking and selecting "Reclassify." As always, these features were aimed at helping developers maintain their workflow.

Visual Studio Code | Reclassify

4 | Pieces AI Assistant - Saving Snippets Made Magical

The fourth major update of the year came in April when we introduced Auto-save. This feature brought the Pieces AI assistant to your workflow, giving you the superpower to save snippets intelligently based on workflow.

Visual Studio Code | Auto-Save

5 | Core Features of PFD Brought to You in Visual Studio Code

The remaining core features of the Pieces Desktop app were introduced to VS Code in mid-2022. Tree View auto-expansion, auto-saving of snippets, the ability to add tags and related links within your IDE, log in/log out directly in the extension, and an updated settings option with improved success and error messages; all directly in your editor so you didn’t have to use the Pieces Desktop app if you didn’t want to.

6 | Edit Snippets Directly in Visual Studio Code

In May, we updated to VS Code 0.1.8. This version gave you the ability to edit and import snippets directly in VS Code, without the need to open Pieces for Developers.

Visual Studio Code | Edit & Import

The Tree View also allowed users to choose how they view their snippets and offered the choice for auto-save to be toggled on or off via settings.

Visual Studio Code | Snippet Categorization

7 | Snippet Search in Visual Studio Code

May also saw the advent of VS Code 0.1.10. This update introduced a fast new way to search and insert snippets from the Pieces library without using your mouse. To search, simply press a shortcut (CTRL + K or CMD + K), search for a snippet, and hit Enter.

Visual Studio Code | Snippet Search

8 | UX Customization

As we crossed the halfway point in 2022, we ramped up our focus on UX. In July, we released Visual Studio Code 0.1.14. This added options to customize the Pieces experience by limiting notifications and choosing how to accept auto-complete suggestions. This gave users the power to choose between "Critical Notifications" or "All Notifications" and select their preferred key for accepting auto-complete suggestions: either Enter or Tab, or only Tab.

9 | Git History Directly in PFD

More spooky auto-magical enrichment happened in October. Code snippets were enhanced to include context from Git history such as code authors, commit messages, file names, etc. The Pieces Explorer was also improved with an "About" section where users could access the Pieces Support Center and connect with our community.

When you save a snippet from code that has been in a Git repo, Pieces auto-magically associates commit messages, commit authors, project and file names and more. (Choose which context you want to capture in the Pieces for Visual Studio Code settings!)

10 | OCR In The IDE - The Holidays Came Early!

To cap off the year, we introduced two new features to our users in VS Code. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) was brought into VS Code so that you could preview and edit code/text from screenshots in your IDE. We also gave you the power to edit extracted code/text from images.

The best is yet to come to PFD for Visual Studio Code

The Pieces team had a highly successful year in 2022, providing numerous updates and new features for the VS Code community. With so many useful features, this review of the top 10 product features for 2023 will help you make the most of the Pieces for Developers VS Code plugin. Stay tuned for all of our updates this year! We’re already off to a blazing start with the integration of GPT-3, and will be bringing new benefits that will be sure to blow your mind and 10x your workflow.

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