Ask HN: What extensions/packs of VS Code are must for web/developers to install?

MAGMA <3

Shouldn't Microsoft be included these days as well?

Working for the MMAAAN...

...you gotta use these fancy VS Code extensions

1. Team onboarding is almost zero effort. I spent upwards of a week onboarding in the past (install this library, install this server, install is broken, try again, etc.). That becomes clone, click, and forget with dev-containers.

2. If you CI you dev-container and publish to a private registry, only one computer is spending the time installing and setting up dependencies. Everyone else simply bases their local image off of that one (and saving productive working time).

3. If you mess up the dev environment with some failed experiment, simply recreate the container and carry on.

4. The dockerfile is a form of documentation: what is needed for this thing to run.

5. If you use Github, you can run your environment in a browser if you are in a pinch. I've only done this once, but it was hella useful.

I’m curious what language you’re working on and what formatter it uses? In my experience many formatters will not run if the AST is invalid.

Mine won't do any auto-formatting when the syntax is invalid, so when I hit CMD + S and it _doesn't_ format it's a cue to start looking for errors.

There is a package called „black“ (pip install black) that formats code according to PEP8 (most of the time). You might take a look if you’re interested. I’m using it occasionally and it didn’t do anything royally stupid until now. If the code isn’t syntactically correct it won’t run.

Yes, very true. For TypeScript I do use Prettier so yeah, there _is_ an extension involved. For others, this is basically what it takes (plus making the conscious decision to enforce formatting on your repo, which I think you should!):

Install the plugin and add this config:

  "[typescript]": {
    "editor.defaultFormatter": "esbenp.prettier-vscode",
    "editor.formatOnSave": true
  }

Python: Black

TypeScript, JavaScript, JSON: Prettier

HTML: Built-in

Rust: rust-analyzer + whatever the formatter is built in to Rust's toolchain.

XML: XML Tools

They all operate using the same API, I think, so setting up `formatOnSave: true` is all I have to do for most of them.

Are you asking about pure SQL files (with .sql extension) or SQL embedded in expressions in other file types? The answer is a simple yes for the former with the right extension/configuration. Searching for adpyke.vscode-sql-formatter should give you a good one. Unfortunately, in the latter (and for me, more common) case, I can't find a good solution.

I am curious what you mean by slow.

CSharpier started as a prettier plugin, and it was definitely slow then. ~30 minutes for a project with around 10k files if I remember correctly and the formatting was just barely implemented. At this point it is ~40s without --fast, or ~27s with it. CSharpier is stable enough that I should make --fast the default option.

Individual file formatting is a bit slow which is the overhead of starting up a new .Net console app every time. NativeAOT is a potential solution, but probably not until .net7. Building plugins that keep csharpier running in the background and piping files to it is the other option. That is one of the next things on my list.

Your boss must love that you’re essentially doing work just to throw it away.

It even changed my personal coding style. Things I chose to do before now look ugly to me.

I didn’t read all of the comments, but it seems to me that the interaction at the beginning of the thread is pretty close to how polite, respectful online conversations should be carried out. I don’t use Prettier, but this is my own choice, and if someone else likes them I certainly don’t think this thread is cause for denigrating the team or their work. Am I missing something?

- The Prettier team has decided that they will not be adding new options. Since they explicitly bill themselves as an opinionated formatter, that seems reasonable to me.

- There is a fork of Prettier that supports breakBeforeElse, and this fork was suggested by a member of the Prettier team as a way for the requester to get this option

Well, database result exporters (into CSV/TSV/whatever) and JPA entity generators are built as IDE scripts, so there is at least some level of support. I could never find any decent documentation though.

Look into

Alt+1 → Scratches and consoles → Extensions

And here's a random "blog post" with some additional examples:

https://gist.github.com/gregsh/b7ef2e4ebbc4c4c11ee9

> Is there a way to script IntelliJ?

There is in NetBeans so I guess there is one for IntelliJ as well.

I've found JetBrains IDEs have pretty good Git tooling, and can show you history for selection and viewing complex commit histories. What do you use in GitLens that you find better than IDEA? I'm curious if it is worth making the jump.

How does gitlens help with merge conflicts?

I had a similar setup at a previous job. Basically, the journey went like:

1. I already used VSCode as my daily driver. 2. Backend team all used IDEA for their Java codebase/had some workflows designed with it in mind. 3. I familiarized myself with IDEA for working on the backend, but used VSCode for the rest of the codebase.

Not OP, but I'm doing the same thing. I spend 95% of my time in IDEA, though. VSC is for Ansible playbooks (because it has a relatively decent extension), and when I need a quick and dirty fix in some other projects (so you don't have to wait five times as long for IDEA to warm up).

It’s pretty common to have two different IDEs open on the same project. For example QT developers will often have the QT creator as well as VS code open. Developers on Apple‘s platforms almost always keep Xcode open, while they may also have another IDE open alongside it that allows them to work in the project with greater productivity, but still build and profile and do other things that are only available in Xcode.

For those not following the release notes `"editor.bracketPairColorization.enabled": true` is a new option in VSCode (since September's release) after the team saw how common extensions like Indent Rainbow and Bracket Pair Colorizer 2 were and how many complaints were out there about how slow they were, so they decided to add it as a built in feature that can reuse the same processes as the core indent guides. Also a lot of interesting work went into optimizing the algorithms at work: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2021/09/29/bracket-pair-...

An interesting case of the team watching the extensions ecosystem for ideas to make the core product better.

VSCode has a VIM plugin. This would be more like saying you use CarPlay in your Tesla instead of the built in Tesla software for navigating the radio.

Presumably they prefer the look of one IDE and the features of another?

For no good reason whatsoever.

Because I am the kind of nerd that has on old copy of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines on their bookshelf and VS Code is leagues above any well designed editor for TS.