So by now I have definitely heard the buzz around Visual Studio Code. I even downloaded and kicked the tires the same day the public beta was released. It’s just that I spend most of my time building desktop applications so I didn’t see what the big deal was and I was never drawn to it. I did use it on a regular basis as a Notepad replacement so it was top of mind when I had a project where I had to work on some HTML5.
So I tried it as a HTML editor and still wasn’t all that impressed with it (at first). All that changed after I added a few extensions, changed the theme and altered the default font.
Now it is absolutely my favorite tool for working with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The Intellisence is fast and useful, there a vast number of extensions that make it even better, it includes a built in debugging tool and the best part is that it is completely free,
You can get an idea of the its power and extensibility by checking out the Visual Studio Code Marketplace. So far my favorite extensions are
- Auto Close Tag
- C# for Visual Studio Code
- Custom Theme for Visual Studio Code
- HTML CSS Support
- HTML Snippets
- Live HTML Previewer.
I am sure there are other great extensions and can’t wait to dig deeper into the marketplace to find some of them.
For the most part I live in Visual Studio Professional and I don’t see this tool changing that for the majority of my work. However this is currently my number one choice for, I hate to say, light editing work. And to be clear I hate to say it because it is more then just a light weight text editor. It is an extremely powerful editor with professional features. So I won’t claim that it is a “must have” tool but I will say that it’s definitely a “must try” tool.
Oh and I should mention that its a cross platform editor that will run on Windows, Linux and Apple.
