When it comes to technology, there are thousands of tools you could use. How could you know where to start?
For someone who started coding a few years ago, this barrage of information was too vast for me to easily identify.
I am no expert, but I found along the way, by experiencing some tools or reading articles as this one, found some interesting plug-ins that I’ll share with you:
Bracket Pair Colorizer
This extension will highlight matching brackets in the editor.
It helps you identify the matching brackets in your code, and thus develop or debug functions easily with a quick colorful hint right on your code.
Git Graph
This extension will show you a graph of your git history.
With it, you can see in your editor the full graph history of the distant repository you are working on. Every commit is represented by a dot, and the lines between them are the commits that are related to each other. You can click on a commit to see its details.
This tool has proven very helpful to monitor repositories and find flawed pushes to revert, when working on a project, particularly when we where in a Hackathon last year. Late night commits mistakes were made…
Prettier
Automatically formats your code when you save it. Never manually indent your code again to make it human-legible. Prettier will make that for you much faster and way better that you could have.
VSCode-Icons
Adds icons to the VSCode file tree. You’ll find way faster the what you’re looking for, with the benefit of not having to squint and make that stupid face we all make when trying to find that damn file that you know is right under your nose.
You can probably tell I discovered that one pretty late.
Tabnine
Tabnine is the AI code completion assistant trusted by millions of developers to amplify coding accuracy and boost productivity. Whether you are a new dev or a seasoned pro, working solo or part of a team, your Tabnine AI assistant will suggest team-tailored code completions in all the most popular coding languages and all your favorite IDEs.
It’s a great tool to use when you’re working on a project, and you want to see what’s available in the language you’re working on. It really helped me boost my productivity, and code precision.
ESLint
ESLint is a JavaScript static analysis tool that checks your code for errors and helps you fix them.
This is handy for getting hints about bugs as you are writing your code and, depending on your configuration, it can help enforce good coding style.
Conclusion
As the author said, you probably have your own tool set, and some are probably very different from the ones I have used. It is important to understand and identify tools that are helpful to you and your processes, and to learn how thos tools work.
Even though it is fun to discover new tools and plug-ins, some will just wreck the usefulness of the others, so don’t forget to keep it simple and clean your toolset from time to time.
