One of the most essential tool as software developer 💻 is a source-code editor; a program that in addition to editing offers functions to improve our productivity. In the market there are many free options but none as robust as Visual Studio Code created by Microsoft.
To get started with VSCode normally I recommend the course in spanish Visual Studio Code: Mejora tu velocidad para codificar by Fernando Herrera in Udemy, if you do not speak spanish, do not worry, Udemy has also english courses about VSCode.
Then, before you spend time without finding out (like me 😬) about some other useful extensions, I recommend you these ones for general use:
- Bracket Pair Colorizer 2 and Indent-rainbow: Highlighters for key-brackets and indentation by different color.
- Code Spell Checker and its Spanish version: Spelling checker for source code, like variable name, functions, commentaries, etc.
- ESLint and Prettier: Code formatter and problem fixer.
- Git Lens: Line display on last commit and git blame.
- Material Icon Theme: Material Design Icons.
- Peacock: Workspace color customizer for multiple VSC instances.
- Settings Sync: Configuration Backup with GitHub Gist.
- Tabnine: Code autocompleter with artificial intelligence.
- Todo Highlight and Todo Tree: Highlighter for TODOs and FIXMEs in the code, and section for its easy location in the project.
- Trailing Spaces: Highlighter for unnecessary spaces in code.
- WakaTime: Activity tracker and metric generator in the editor.