VSCode or Visual Studio Code is a IDE (Integrated Development Environment) developed by Microsoft. It's like the best IDE for most languages, it comes with several built-in extensions and supports for lot languages.

VSCode offers you to install extensions. Extensions can be used to add new features to VSCode like:

• Theme (color, product icon, file icon)

• Syntax highlighting

• Autocomplete or snippets

• Features (like to take a screenshot of code)

• AI suggestions/chat

And lot more.

In this article, I will tell you about a few, best and top 5 VSCode extensions every developer must use. Let's get there!

I may not show some extensions that most peoples don't use, including me personally. You could find out them up on google or the official VSCode Marketplace.

1. Prettier

Prettier is the developer's must-have extension. It is a code formatter for a lot of languages.

Ugly or minified code seems too bad. It is not even understandable, and also not if wrongly formatted. Prettier solves it all!

Get prettier: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=esbenp.prettier-vscode

2. Live Server

Live Server is a great extension. You can start a local development server of HTML-CSS-JavaScript & PHP. Give it a try!

Ritwick Dey built this extension. Additionally, he's working on a better improvement, that is Live Server +. Try it out!

Yannick also made a fork of this extension and improved it with new features. It's called Five Server. Give it a try also!

I personally recommend you to use Five Server as it's even more better.

Live Server: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ritwickdey.LiveServer

Live Server + (not on marketplace yet, you need to install from source): https://github.com/ritwickdey/vscode-live-server-plus-plus

Five Server: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=yandeu.five-server

3. Import Cost

This extension shows you the import cost of the package you are importing on require and import from imports.

This extension is super useful for those who want to reduce the size of their code or know what makes builds slow.

Get it: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=wix.vscode-import-cost

4. GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot is an AI collaboration tool developed by GitHub. It gives you amazing features like:

• AI Chat

• Autocomplete and suggestions

• Explain Code

• Create Tests

• Fix Code/Errors

• Generate AI Commit Message

AI is literally seen everywhere nowadays. I personally say GitHub Copilot might be at top, but it is not because it is not free for everyone. You need to buy a plan to get it.

Get it: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GitHub.copilot

You may try these AI extensions too:

• Tabnine AI

• Blackbox AI

• Codium AI

They are likely free!

5. Live Share

Sometimes, you seriously need collaboration with someone. VSCode has a extension, Live Share, that can be used to do collaboration with someone other realtime.

• You can share ports (tunnel them)

• You can grant access to your terminal

• You can grant access to your workspace (edit or read files)

Get it: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MS-vsliveshare.vsliveshare

Conculsion

So far, I've told you 5 top VSCode extensions. Give it a try and let me know if you like it!