Continuing our series where we talk about our preferred code editor
A lot has been said, written, and ranted, about programming editors and IDEs over the years. Allow us to add to the noise.
It’s Matt’s turn this week to talk about his choice, VS Code…
Built on the same Electron framework as Mr. Poole’s choice, VS Code is the first IDE I’ve actively chosen that is developed by Microsoft. Although it shares the Visual Studio moniker, it’s a totally different beast to the full blown C# IDE that Windows developers use. This is a lightweight text editor with added bells and whistles.
I only switched over about six months ago from Atom, but I’ve found that it’s made my dev experience far more flexible. From the tighter integration of Git, an integrated terminal window and many many plugins, there is everything I need for my daily node and JavaScript development needs.
Like Atom, there are so many plugins. Some of my favourites are…
- Beautify which tidies up code for you.
- Docker for working with container-ising your application.
- ESLint the almost required JavaScript linting utility.
- JSON Tools useful utilities for working with JSON.
I’ve got others, but I feel like I’m going on a little too much about VS Code 😃
But I also thought it would be good to mention the other place I spend a lot of my time, and that’s Chrome. Just a plain install is great for the web developer, but once you add some extensions, it becomes truly useful.
The ones I can’t live without are…
- 1Password - my password manager of choice
- Full Page Screen Capture - which takes a screenshot of a full web page even when it’s too tall for the browser
- Browserstack - for testing different browsers
- React Developer Tools - React is my chosen front end framework these days and these tools are really useful
- EditThisCookie - cookies are a necessary evil of web development, this tool lets you manage them
- Show me the styles! - a relatively new addition to my suite, it lets you select an element on a page and shows you useful information about it
So these are some of my every day development tools. What are some of yours?
