Intellisense

This handles syntax highlighting properties and a very powerful autocomplete that provides smart completions according to the programming language being typed, completing variable types, modules importation and definition of functions, interfaces, units, colors, global identifiers, keywords and basically anything related to the language construct.

Full Git Integration

VS Code has a complete end-to-end git integration feature that would not have any need of a command line interface or any Git GUI once a git folder is initialized. This is such a big deal in this progressive age of open sourcing and remote collaboration around the globe. Every single important git command has been seamlessly added to your IDE in a click-through-easy-to-use form for your comfort and great pleasure. Microsoft as we know, takes open source technology really seriously (if this was not clear before, it became crystal clear after Github was acquired) and so has a git button on the Task Bar.

the third icon is the git icon

Live Share

As a developer, you must have come across some pretty disturbing bugs or errors you cannot even seem to find a suitable solution on github gists or stackoverflow and you just wish you could share that particular instance of your IDE with that bad*ss backend developer. Good news, Visual Studio Code has a new interesting feature called Live Share which lets you do exactly that. You can forward or share any TCP process on your computer with people who are currently connected to your Live Share instance.

Live Share Preview

Super-Awesome Integrated Terminal

You know how ordinarily we have a git bash terminal open for quick cli commands while development is ongoing, my favorite functions with the cli is ‘git status’ or ‘npm install xxx’ for quickly bringing in dependencies and packages. VS Code has changed all that, it ships with a very intuitive Integrated Terminal right in the Development Environment, saving you the costly stress of toggling on and off and potentially losing focus.

git bash currently running inside VS-Code

Intuitive Settings Search Engine

With over 400 settings in VS Code alone (excluding settings for extensions) VS Code ships with a very intuitive search engine for easily searching for a particular setting.

search like its google

Extensions and Robust Marketplace

Very few IDEs use extensions to improve the rate and quality of development, saving developers time and money and giving contributors to open source a platform to share ingenious ideas. VS Code stands out in this department as the forerunner of IDE extensions with a lot of extensions having millions of downloads (crazy right?). From Linting, to Docker support to NPM support to even javascript framework extensions, VS-Code marketplace is a full fledged extension-store on its own. Here is a screenshot of my extension page.

My VS-Code extension bar

Conclusion

At this juncture, I must have convinced you to at least check out Visual Studio Code for some wonders. There are almost 50 cool things I could not even begin to talk about in this article, but because of how awesome it is, Burke H✪lland and Sarah Drasner came together to create VS-Code-can-do-that? Check it out. This article was motivated by the work of Chris Ganga.

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