A big part of a being a developer is to write code for long periods - nothing new here. With that in mind, developers look for tools that help optimise time and make the process easier.

Visual Studio Code arrived in 2015 and as the geeky guy who wants the new toy I promptly installed it on my laptop. In no time it became my go-to code editor for frontend development. I felt that UI was well layed out and the performance of the application was good with a low memory footprint. In a lot of ways it felt like a lighter version of Visual Studio - my favorite and the best IDE ever!

Yet, compared to the older brother, VS Code was also very customizable. It allowed to install a myryad of plugins accessible from an appstore-like interface. Well configured, VSCode can often replace full Visual Studio and become quite powerful.

Now with all that said here are my favorite extensions:

Look and feel

• One Dark Pro
• VSCode-Icons

Code editing helpers

• Auto Close Tag ❤️
• Auto Rename Tag
• Color Highlight
• HTML Snippets
• JavaScript (ES6) code snippets
• Reactjs code snippets

Utilities

• Path intellisense
• ESLint
• Prettier ❤️ - no more fussing with indentations, brackets, commas, etc.
• Copy Relative Path

There are a few others I add to give me more snippets for a specific language but these are my must have on a new machine.

So here you have, my essential list of extensions for VSCode. What are yours?