8 Essential VS Code Extensions You Should Know

Visual Studio Code is the most popular text editor and it has extensions that can significantly enhance your workflow. From seamless code formatting to time-saving snippets, the right tools can make all the difference in boosting your productivity. In this article, I’ll share 11 of my favorite VS Code extensions that have transformed my daily development routine. Read on to discover how these powerful extensions can elevate your coding experience.

Here is the list:

• Prettier
• Live Server
• Console Ninja
• Auto Rename Tag
• ES7+ React/Redux/React-Native Snippets
• Tailwind CSS IntelliSense
• Thunder Client
• GitLens

I’ll give a brief overview of these extensions.

Prettier

Prettier is a popular extension with over 40 million installations. It automatically formats your code to keep it organized, consistent, and easy to read, ensuring uniformity across your team or project. By adhering to a set of predetermined guidelines, Prettier saves you time and effort, letting you focus on coding rather than formatting.

Console Ninja

Console Ninja displays console log output and runtime errors directly in your editor, eliminating the need to manually open dev tools to see console output. It’s particularly convenient for checking data-fetching outputs and comes with success codes as well. Check their documentation for more on supported technologies.

ES7+ React/Redux/React-Native Snippets

This extension offers code snippets for ES7+ syntax in React, Redux, and React-Native, saving developers time and effort. For example, typing ‘rfc’ generates a basic skeleton for a React functional component. Check out this article for a list of useful snippets.

Tailwind CSS IntelliSense

Tailwind CSS IntelliSense provides Tailwind CSS snippets and suggestions. It highlights potential errors in your CSS and markup and shows the complete CSS for a Tailwind class name when you hover over it. Enabling this extension means you won’t have to manually type Tailwind class names.

Thunder Client

Thunder Client is a lightweight, fast, and easy-to-use REST API client for VS Code. It allows you to test your APIs directly in VS Code without needing Postman. Thunder Client supports collections, environments, Git collaboration, and local storage.

Auto Rename Tag

Auto Rename Tag automatically renames paired HTML tags. Change the opening tag of a paragraph to a div, and the extension will automatically rename the closing tag. This helps reduce syntax errors and saves you from redundant work.

Highlight Matching Tag

This extension highlights matching opening and closing tags, making it easier to see where a section of code begins and ends. By default, tag pairs are underlined with a yellow line, helping you target individual divs with ease.

GitLens

GitLens gives you a deeper understanding of how code changed and by whom through in-editor code annotations and rich hovers. You can effortlessly explore a file’s history to see how the code evolved. Its powerful filters allow you to search by commit, message, author, changed files, or even specific code changes.

Conclusion

These extensions can greatly enhance your development workflow in VS Code. Try them out and see the difference they make!