Visual Studio Code is a powerful editor out of the box, but there are many many VS Code extensions to make it even more powerful!

If you're new to VS Code or coding in general, I recommend reading through everything here to see if there are new ways you can optimize your workflow. If you're a VS Code veteran, see if there's anything here you don't have, and let me know in the comments if I missed anything!

VS Code is constantly updating, and I regularly review my extensions to figure out which ones are and are not adding value. I'll be keeping this list updated as I add and remove extensions.

Must-have extensions (alphabetical)

Bonus

These items don't dramatically improve my day-to-day productivity, but golly, I sure do like them:

Dracula Offical – my preferred color theme

– my preferred color theme file-icons – gives unique file icons to quickly identify types in the file browser. I find it most useful for quickly distinguishing between .ts , .js , .test.ts , & .test.js .

– gives unique file icons to quickly identify types in the file browser. I find it most useful for quickly distinguishing between , , , & . Fira Code – a spiffy-looking font that includes some sweet ligatures! This means that inequality symbols such as <= and !== show up as a single character. It hasn't improved my coding, per se, but it has made me feel cooler. ℹ️ Other ligatured fonts recommended by readers: JetBrains Mono, Cascadia Code, Recursive Sans & Mono

NOTE: Ligatures can be a controversial topic among coders. My argument for using them is that I think they're sexy. I rest my case.

Vim – When I first started coding, I got really into becoming a Vim editor power user. The functionality of VS Code goes far beyond the utility I get from Vim, but sometimes I miss those old "Change 100 lines with 5 cryptic keystrokes" features. I mostly leave this disabled, but I fire it up every once in a while when I'm feeling spunky.

Extensions I no longer use

Sometimes I stop using an extension because the functionality is added to base VS Code, or maybe the extension isn't as useful as I once thought it was. Here are some extensions I used heavily once, but eventually uninstalled:

Anything else?

What did I miss? Is there any other extension that helps you be a productive coder? Please let me know in the comments!

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