The Best VS Code Extensions

Visual Studio Code is one of the most popular code editors used by software developers. It is free, open-source, lightweight, and has support for all operating systems. VS Code has a wide variety of extensions that developers can install to boost their productivity, improve their IDE experience, and simplify their coding processes. Amidst the numerous extensions in the VS Code marketplace, developers must know the best VS Code extensions to install and use in their everyday coding.

In this article, you will learn about the 10 best Visual Studio Code extensions to install that will absolutely ease your development process. Without wasting time, let’s dive in!

1. Pieces for VS Code

Pieces for VS Code is one of the top VS Code extensions. It focuses on enhancing developer productivity by providing features to save, enrich, search, share, reference, reuse, and generate code snippets. This extension performs major development tasks like generating code, modifying code, getting more insights on code snippets and more. In addition to this, the Pieces for VS Code extension also provides:

• Pieces Copilot: With the Pieces Copilot in VS Code, you gain insights on code snippets — why your code doesn’t work, and why your code works. With centralized intelligence that learns from your workflow, you can generate snippets while preserving context across your other toolchain with Pieces. The Pieces Copilot is one addition you do not want to go without in development. Here’s an instance of the Pieces Copilot giving insights on a piece of code I have:

A complete breakdown of your codebase with just a simple prompt!

• Code Lens: The code lens appears in each method of your code, it allows you to comment or explain a block of code. In the demo below, the Pieces extension generates comments for the block of code.

• Live Context: The live context feature allows the Pieces Copilot to understand your workflow even better and provides major insights into how, where, and when you work. This is particularly helpful when you’re faced with several tasks and you need some assistance in sorting or remembering some of the information you might have missed. Another interesting use case is the live context providing important points from a documentation you had just taken a single scroll on. Here’s a demo:

Here, I ask the Pieces Copilot (with Live Context turned on) what I was working on and it mentions The 10 Best VS Code Extensions (this article!) and an article on Live Context (which I had visited earlier to get a link to attach to this article). Come on, how magical is that? Definitely one of the most fun VS Code extensions. Explore these features and more when you install the Pieces for VS Code Extension.

2. Live Server

The Live Server extension saves development time by providing auto-reload without manually refreshing the browser when a new change is made on VS Code. It has an easy-to-use interface, developers can easily start the live server by clicking the “Go live” button on the status bar, making it one of the best extensions for Visual Studio Code.

3. Prettier

Another of the best VS Code extensions, Prettier is a code formatting tool that provides consistent styling across development teams. With each save on VS Code, the Prettier extension automatically formats the codebase to follow a consistent style. Code readability is an important aspect of development as it helps to identify bugs easily and fosters easy collaboration across teams.

4. WakaTime

WakaTime is an open-source extension that helps developers keep track of their coding activities and particularly gives insights into the time spent on projects. It runs in the background and tracks the time you spend in VS Code, which is displayed on the status bar. Also, it provides a dashboard that gives additional information on your coding activities such as the language frequently used, projects being worked on, etc. WakaTime is one of the best VSCode extensions for increasing productivity by allowing you to set daily and weekly goals to work towards. Here’s WakaTime showing me how much time I’ve spent so far on VS Code (1hr 4mins).

5. Peacock

Having to distinguish between multiple windows of VS code can sometimes be confusing, but not with the Peacock extension. The Peacock helps to distinguish between multiple active VS code windows by providing a distinct color for each window, making it one of the must-have VSCode extensions. Here’s a sample:

In the above sample, I have three active windows with distinct colors to easily identify them.

6. GitLens

GitLens is an open-source extension that fosters collaboration in development by allowing developers to visualize code authorship and see who has changed a section of the codebase and when they changed it. It also helps to explicitly visualize what has been added or removed from the codebase at a particular instance. It shows the author that last modified a particular piece of code.

With the help of the GitLens extension, I can see that the codebase above was last modified by me (James Amoo) with the commit Add files via upload.

Also, GitLens helps to show revisions in the codebase, showing what was added and/or removed. This is a useful VSCode extension and I think one of the best extensions for VS Code.

7. Live Share

Live Share is a cool VS Code extension that provides real-time developer collaboration. It provides an environment for easy code editing and debugging by multiple parties. Multiple developers can make changes simultaneously to a single file. It allows developers to engage in pair programming and make corrections to the codebase in real time.

8. Tailwind CSS IntelliSense

The Tailwind CSS IntelliSense comes in handy when working with Tailwind CSS in styling a project. It provides features such as autocomplete, syntax highlighting, and linting. This is important because it saves developers time to manually check the Tailwind CSS documentation and skim through multiple utility classes. It also helps developers to get familiar with the syntax and available utility classes. In addition to this, it allows you to see the actual CSS equivalent when you hover over a utility class. This makes it hands-down one of the best VS Code extensions for web development.

9. Better Comments

The penultimate in our list of the best VS Code plugins, the Better Comments extension helps to create more human-friendly comments in your codebase. It enhances the readability and overall functionality of your code. It provides developers with a feature to categorize comments based on their purpose or urgency. Comments can be categorized into alerts, queries, TODOs, highlights, etc.

10. Polacode

Last but not least, Polacode is one of the must-have extensions for VS Code. It helps developers create shareable and aesthetic screenshots of their code. It is useful for developers who love to share code snippets in image formats (.png and .jpg) on social media or public platforms. The image conforms to the styling and fonts just as it appears in VS Code. Bloggers, educators, and people who love to share code snippets in a graphical format will find the Polacode extension particularly useful.

Conclusion

The variety of extensions available for Visual Studio Code, when used correctly, make development easier and enhance productivity. In this article, you learned about the best VS Code extensions to install in your IDE. Happy coding!