Top 5 Extensions for your VS Code 🧨

3 min readJul 18, 2021

Introduction

Your productivity is governed by your tool belt. Obviously, you can write code in a notepad or a terminal, but if productivity does count for you, then VS Code is the most customizable of all editors/IDEs. I am primarily a Ruby on Rails developer but the extensions I am recommending below count for all languages except the first one.

1. Ruby extension pack:

Well, in short, it’s not an extension but a collection of numerous ruby on rails extensions. This extension pack includes Ruby, Ruby Solargraph, ruby-rubocop, Ruby Language Colorization, Ruby Haml, Simple Ruby ERB, ruby-linter, ruby-symbols.

Extension Link: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=walkme.Ruby-extension-pack

2. Git Lens:

Yeah, that’s the famous turbocharger. I mainly use it to blame code, i.e, knowing who wrote the line which I am about to change.

GitLens supercharges the Git capabilities built into Visual Studio Code. It helps you to visualize code authorship at a glance via Git blame annotations and code lens, seamlessly navigate and explore Git repositories, gain valuable insights via powerful comparison commands, and so much more.

Extension Link: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=eamodio.gitlens

3. Error Lens:

Most certainly this is the cure for my OCD. ErrorLens turbo-charges language diagnostic features by making diagnostics stand out more prominently, highlighting the entire line wherever a diagnostic is generated by the language and also prints the message inline. Key features being:

Highlight lines containing diagnostics
Append diagnostic as text to the end of the line
Show icons in the gutter
Show message in the status bar

Extension Link: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=usernamehw.errorlens

4. Tabnine - AI Code Completion:

Whether you call it IntelliSense, intelliCode, autocomplete, AI-assisted code completion, AI-powered code completion, AI copilot, AI code snippets, code suggestion, code prediction, code hinting, or content assist, you probably already know that it can save you tons of time, easily cutting your keystrokes in half. Whether you’re just getting started as a developer or if you’ve been doing it for decades, Tabnine will help you code twice as fast — all in your favourite IDE.

Extension Link: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=TabNine.tabnine-vscode

5. CodeSnap:

If you have seen my previous blogs, almost all of them contained a code screenshot at least. CodeSnap is really simple to use just select the code and it will generate a mac-ish screenshot for it on the fly. Features included: