Extensions to your IDE are invaluable to speed up your work without reducing the quality of your output. Considering Visual Studio Code is the most popular IDE, its Marketplace should be your go-to destination for all sorts of VS IDE extensions. Continue reading this article to find the best VS IDE extensions you can utilize in your web app or Windows app development projects.

What Are Visual Studio IDE Extensions?

VS Code is a super-organized source code editor that supports software and app development operations like version control, debugging, and task running. It provides an efficient platform to the developers for an effortless code-build-debug cycle for most programming languages. However, you will need an IDE like Visual Studio for complex workflows.

To overcome the shortcomings, developers have come up with VS Code extensions. Extensions are simply add-ons that you can install in the VS Code app and gain access to new functionalities. VS IDE extensions mainly increase productivity and make coding easier and flawless.

Here are some of the VSCode we will cover

1. Setting Sync

Before you start installing extensions left and right, it's good to know of the existence of Settings Sync. It allows you to sync pretty much everything you customize on VSCode to Github, from settings to keyboard shortcuts to other VSCode extensions.

This way, you'll have access to your preferred IDE from whichever device you want, instead of having to program from a vanilla VSCode environment on new devices or having to manually set up everything again.

2.Live server

This is one of my favorite extensions. Live Server launches a local development server with a live reload feature both for static and dynamic pages.

Every time you save your code, you'll instantly see the changes reflected in the browser. You'll be much faster at spotting errors and it's much easier to do some quick experiments with your code.

3.Prettier – Code formatter

If you want to implement a common style guide across all the development projects in your team, you must try out the Prettier add-on for VS Code. Here are some features of this add-on that you should know:

Opinionated code formatting extension

Integrates with many code editors

Style discussions become useless when you use this tool

It saves you energy and time

Sometimes, as a developer, you may need to work on an inconsistent codebase. You can easily clean and reformat an existing codebase using this extension on VS Code.

4.Project Manager

If you are a software development project manager and supervise multiple DevOps projects on VS Code, you should try out Project Manager. The tool enables you to access all the projects from one computer no matter where the projects are available.

5.Auto Rename Tag

While VSCode inherently highlights matching tags and immediately adds closing tags whenever you type an opening tag, Auto Rename Tag automatically renames tags that you change.

The extension works for HTML, XML, PHP, and JavaScript, and removes the need to change your tag names twice.

edit: a few people in the comments have mentioned that Auto Rename Tag is quite buggy, so proceed with care.

6.SonarLint

SonarLint is an open-source Visual Studio extension that allows you to fix coding issues before they appear. The add-on highlights security vulnerabilities and bugs as you write the code in Visual Studio. Its interface is simple and works just like a spell-checking app in any text editor.

Furthermore, the tool provides you with clear resolution guidance. Thus, you get the chance to fix the code before the workflow commits to the program. Moreover, the extension of VS Code supports different programming language analyses like C++, C, Java, HTML, PHP, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python.

7.Polacode

Polacode is an add-on for VS Code that enables you to instantly create beautiful screenshots of your software or app code. Then you can use the resulting component to share your coding work with collaborators, friends, or clients. The best part is that it keeps all the existing VS Code themes and code fonts. The add-on just puts the code into a nice layout that looks professional.

The extension comes with a dragging feature to resize the container or code snippet. You just need to hold and drag the lower right corner. Other commands that you can use to control image appearances are polacode.shadow, polacode.target, polacode.backgroundColor, etc.

8.Gitlens

GitLens supercharges the Git capabilities of Visual Studio Code. This is a powerful extension that allows you to see who, why, and how lines of code have changed over time (among lots of other features).

GitLens is a highly customizable extension. If you don’t like a particular setting, you can easily turn it off in settings.

9.CSS Peek

This extension is invaluable for front-end developers. Inspired by a similar feature in the IDE Brackets, CSS Peek allows you to extend your HTML and ejs file to show CSS/SCSS/LESS code within the source code.

It also allows you to quickly jump to the right CSS code if you know the class or ID name.

10.Peacock

Here’s a cute one. Peacock allows you to change the color of your Visual Studio Code environment, so you can quickly identify which instance you’ve just switched to.

11.Code Spell Checker

Although it isn't life-threateningly important, I prefer my code to have no spelling errors. Code Spell Checker underlines words that it doesn't recognize in its dictionary files.

The extension is available in many different languages and supports jargon such as medical terms.

12.Icon fonts

Icon Fonts offers snippets for a variety of icon fonts, including the popular Font Awesome v5 icon pack.

For those of you not using VSCode, this package is also available for Atom and Sublime Text.

13.Path Intellisense

Usually, you need to handle multiple files when working on a software or app development project. When writing a code, you need to enter the file name as-is from your own memory. Now, as the file names contain hyphens, remembering them becomes a challenging task. Here, you can take quick help from Path Intellisense.

It is an extension that autocompletes file names in a codebase. The tool instantly suggests the file you are looking for when it detects the initial letters. It can also help you make hidden files visible.

14.Vs code Icons

You wouldn't think icons make a big difference, but they really do (for me, at least). VSCode-icons adds a splash of color and cute little icons to your IDE that I've come to love.