Personalize Your Integrated Developer Environment
Okay agreed, you shouldn’t care about my favorite color, or the fact that I used a Visual Studio Code extension called Peacock to change the color of my editor border.
But you should care about your developer experience. If you are anything like me, you spend an incredible amount of time coding. With so much time spent doing this, you should consider enhancing your experience. In this post I am going to share with you several personalizations I made to my developer experience that I still don’t regret. All of the ones I will share are for Visual Studio Code.
GitHub Theme
Don’t like the default color scheme of your IDE? Change it. I am currently using GitHub’s Dark version and it is fantastic. The shades of grey are very satisfying. Great color and contrast as well. Changing your theme will change border, tab, background and syntax colors. It is outstanding.
Indent-Rainbow
I just like seeing pretty colors and this extension helps me do that. At every indention level, there is a column of a highlighted aesthetically pleasing color. In addition to prettiness, it helps keep your code organized.
Bracket Pair Colorizor
Where does this bracket line up with? For the love of all things good, where?!!! Oh wait, I just need to match the yellow brackets and… here we go. Yep it’s that easy. If you don’t have this extension. Get it.
Prettier – Code Formatter
Lastly, VSC has functionality to autoformat your code upon saving. That means every time you hit save, an auto formatter like the one shown above will make sure all your spaces, indents, brackets, line-length, etc., are perfect. I have no idea why it took me so long to find this and can’t imagine life without it.
That’s Not All, But I’m Done Writing
In conclusion, make your life better by enriching your development experience. Enjoy the time you spend coding.
– The Coding Hotdog
