In a previous post, I wrote about Visual Studio Code, an essential code editor that you must learn. But today’s entrance, I will try to explain how you can bet the best performance to this tool.
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Make Visual Studio Code portable
If you like to have the portable version of Visual Studio Code, you must know it has a little trick: you must download the portable version, and once unzipped, you must create a new directory named data.
When a new version of VSCode appears, you only need to move the data directory to the new version, and you are done: your favoritr editor with your customization and configuration, ready to go.
VSCode is an editor, not an IDE
IDE means Integradet Development Environment, such as PyCharm, where you have a lot of tools ready to use. But VSCode is a text editor, a very powerful one (like notepad++) due to the extensions available, and it is not focus only on one language but in the one (or more) that you need. Extensions can give you tools in order to get what you exactly need. That’s the difference between VSCode and an IDE, where you have a lot of tools available even if you don’t know how to use them, so IDE’s are heavier.
Editor’s distribution
The most remarkable thing is that it has a side area on the left where it manages much of what you normally need: access to files, access to extensions, control of source code, execute, extensions, or link with SQL Server.
In the lower area, you have a line of information about the application, whether there are errors, updates, ….
The first thing I did was to put a clear theme, because I like it better, although by default it’s dark.
In the case of the code control tool, Git is the standard, and if we have it installed, we can connect it to work more easily.
A good strategy is to activate autosave, although if you need to customize the VSCode configuration, it is best to access Configuration (in the File / Configuration menu), and there you have all the configuration options: font size, family, autosave, ….
In each working directory it is possible to include a settings.json file where you can configure VSCode specifically for that working directory, of course, using the JSON format.
You can also include keybinding.json to customize the keyboard shortcuts in a project, following the same philosophy as before: saving such settings in JSON.
IN case you have english language, you can change it (in my case, move to spanish), and you need to press Control + P in order to have all VSCode options available, and if you write Language, you can click on Configure Display Language:
Next, you have all languages ready to download.
Basic Extensions for VSCode
By large, it is the best feature of this editor. You can install those that you need, loading only the extensions you like, not overloading the editor with features that you don’t need. The next extensions are some that I recommend you:
- VSCode-icons: for adding icons to the files you are working with.
- Beautify: in order to beautify your code
- vscode-todo: To have located all the points of the code where it is necessary to perform actions
And thanks to what I have told you here, you can improve your performance a lot, although of course, you will have to add more extensions for the languages you program with. In my case, VueJS especially with Classic ASP.
In a new entrance, I will try to show you specific extensions for working with VueJS!
Happy coding!