🧑‍💻️ VSCode

Visual Studio Code (or VSCode) is my text editor of choice. The two main features that draw me towards VSCode are:

• Extensibility: There are many existing extensions and I have even played around with developing a custom extension
• Smooth experience: Having worked with editors such as Eclipse, IntelliJ and Visual Studio, I have found that VSCode just feels smoother and more natural to me

The remainder of the page will describe how I have configured VSCode and how I use it.

Extensions

As mentioned before, VSCode is extremely extensible. The extensions I use regularly are:

• Vim: I’m far from a Vim power user, but once you get used to the basics, it’s hard to go back
• markdownlint
• Markdown Emoji
• 🧑‍💻️ My Custom VSCode Extension: Created as a learning experience and to reduce the amount of manual work while writing this website
• Grammarly: Automatically checks spelling and grammar
• Gitlens: I’m mainly using this for the git blame feature and not nearly using this extension to its full capacity
• Python
• ESLint

There are many more installed, but only used very rarely.

Configuration

Markdown link validation

Validating broken local Markdown links can be enabled using

"markdown.validate.enabled": true

I don’t know why this is disabled by default, because it seems like a universally helpful feature.

Exclude external files from search

Folders can be ignored to prevent files from external libraries from showing up when searching in the workspace using the search.exclude setting:

{
	"settings": {
		"search.exclude": {
			"**/__pycache__": true,
			"**/.venv": true,
			"**/.vscode-test": true,
			"**/node_modules": true
		}
	}
}

Disable tabs

In reality, I rarely use different tabs effectively. I’m always juggling a lot of open files in different tabs that I’m not actively working on.

So to reduce the clutter, I’ve disabled tabs using:

"workbench.editor.showTabs": false

Shortcuts

Shortcut	Description
⌘ + K + W	Close all editors
⌃ + `	Open terminal

Developing extensions in VSCode

Useful resources:

• Getting started guide
• Extension API Reference

Related pages

• ⛑️ Kotlin Support in VSCode
• 🌳 VSCode Multi-Root Workspaces

Open Questions

How do I easily switch between the git diff view and the file itself? Looks like I should configure a custom shortcut for this.

Sources:

• Reddit thread
• StackOverflow question