I write this short article to introduce some extensions that are, in my opinion, very useful when working with Visual Studio Code but might not be well known in the community. So please let me know if without these ones, we could do something similar but in a simple way in raw Visual Studio Code.

Nowadays we prefer the approach “Don’t document your code. Code your documentation” but I find that in some particular situations we need to make some comments in traditional way when coding, especially when business logic is far too complex to have our code so self-documenting. This extension is just made for this!

Making different types of comment

What I really like about it is the possibility to customize the color of our choice. By default the comment style is so remarkable that it captures the reader’s attention in the very first time.

Here’s a funny fact about this extension. It makes me follow the above paradigm “Don’t document your code. Code your documentation” in a manner such that if we have too many comments, we’ll have too many colorful paragraphs that can make the code less readable. In such cases we must figure out about how to reduce comments and make our code more self-explanatory.

Yay, my favorite one! I find it useful when working with a large mono-repository (approach recommended by Google, Facebook…).

Search file to import

Instead of having all the time the files structure in the workspace to look for a file’s location, just give the file’s name to this extension and it will give us the relative path from the current location to the target file.

There’s only a limit: if the mono-repository is too large, in the first launch time Relative Path needs to index too many files and it can take seconds before becoming fully functional. We need to use the configuration option: relativePath.ignore to ignore some specific folders like node_modules, Pods, dist, release...

Do you find that it’s just laborious to go exactly to the current line in a file, but in Github page to share to your colleague something? The traditional workflow is to go to Github, find a file, find the line number and send a Github link to your co-worker via Slack.

How to use Git Web Link

With Git Web Links or Open in GitHub / Bitbucket / Gitlab, I believe this task becomes so simple. Just give them a try and enjoy!

I know for sure that there a same extension Git Web Links for Atom, but I don’t remember the name at the time of writing. If you know it, please let me know.

Lastly, I wonder if GitLens could do that but there’re so many options in it that I cannot discover them all.

Just capture your code in a clean way that help you to share it in your blog post after.

Capture and share your code

There’s a limit: it doesn’t work with Better Comments above. I believe it will be much improved in the future.

Like the documentation: A convenient way of creating, duplicating, moving, renaming, deleting files and directories.

Instead of moving around and clicking on file, directory to do some actions, we can do it by our keyboard with this extension.

I was struggling to figure out how to select just the content of a function delimited by {} , what I do so frequently. These two extensions really come to rescue.

I use Bracket Select so frequently that I wonder if VSCode by default can do it now.