Many of you who carry out work related to programming and application development, at a more or less professional level, are surely familiar with the Visual Studio Code editor that Microsoft makes available to us.
For those unfamiliar, Visual Studio Code, or VSCode, is a free and open source programming IDE that gives programmers everything they need to make their projects as easy as possible. It is one of the best programs of this type out there, since it has a large number of customization options to be able to adapt it to our needs.
In addition, this program stands out for allowing developers to adjust and improve its functions through plugins. These “addons” allow us to add functions and features that are not available by default, or adapt the IDE to program in a specific language and improve our productivity and streamline workflows.
In the VSCode extensions store itself we can find hundreds of plugins to download and install. And today we are going to recommend 7 of the most interesting ones that we can download for this program.
Extensions that enhance the Visual Studio Code IDE
Here we offer you a selection of these that you can easily add to VS Code, all for free. This way you can make the program adapt even more to your needs or way of working.
- Python. This is an extension to Visual Studio Code that extends support for the Python programming language valid for all versions. It offers advanced features for debugging and formatting the code that we develop here.
- IntelliCode. Visual Studio IntelliCode is an extension developed to provide us with functions assisted by Artificial Intelligence. It is compatible with a multitude of programming languages ​​such as Python, TypeScript, JavaScript and Java. All this will be extremely useful for developers to improve and better understand the context of the code with machine learning.
- GitLens. This is a powerful open source extension for Visual Studio Code with multiple tools to improve your productivity in the editor. It allows us to save time, improve focus on code development, and optimize collaboration. If we work in a group, this is a complement to better understand, write and review the project’s code.
- wsl. Surely many of you love this extension as it allows us to use VS Code on Windows to create Linux applications. As its own name does not suggest, we can run these developments in the Windows Subsystem for Linux or WSL. Obviously, the plugin offers us all the necessary tools to optimize this process.
- ChatGPT. As you can imagine, this added software allows us to integrate the popular IA service into the Microsoft editor. We will be able to copy and insert code, export code from the conversations with the AI, link the API key compatible with GPT4 or use our own OpenAI server.
- Font Awesome Auto-complete & Preview. The use of all kinds of images and icons in our developments today is common. This is an extension that allows us to autocomplete the code to optimize the use of these contents, which will save us a good amount of time.
- HTML CSS Support. I’m sure many of you use Visual Studio Code to program in HTML and CSS. Well then, we recommend you use this useful extension that will help you receive help and support and thus improve your projects of this type. In addition, it proposes new styles and templates to improve our developments.
If you have other needs, there are plenty of other plugins to download. Simply look for the one that best suits your needs within the store.
