Top Three VS Code Extensions Worth The Money

They say the best things in life are free, but when it comes to software... well, it’s not always true. Don't get me wrong - there are plenty of excellent free, open source tools I use daily. But tools that help you develop faster or more efficiently can easily pay for themselves in terms of time saved, because, as they also say, time is money.

I rounded up a list of the tools that I think are worth paying for and I hope you will find it useful. They all have a decent free plan or trial version available, so you can always kick the tires before you break the bank

GitLive

GitLive is my team’s most recent discovery. It’s a peer-to-peer code streaming platform and IDE UI extensions (for VS Code and JetBrains) that enhance Git with real-time features such as online presence for team members and instant merge conflict detection.

Online presence for team members. The IDE plugin adds a team sidebar/tool window where you can see who in your team is online, what issues and branches they are working on and the changes they’ve made on those branches. This is great for remote teams and really helps when you want to view or share work in progress without resorting to a screen share or cut and pasting snippets of code into Slack or Teams.
Instant merge conflict detection. Indicators in the gutter of your editor show the difference between your changes and the changes of others. These update in real-time as you and your teammates are editing and provide an early warning of potential merge conflicts. They are a great way to get upfront insight into the potentially overlapping work of your colleagues without interruption.

✅ Free plan. Includes

Unlimited users
Social coding and issue tracking
Merge conflict detection on fetch/pull
One-to-one calls with codeshare
40-min call duration limit

💲 Pro plan (10$/user/month or free for Open Source). Includes

Everything from the free plan
Instant merge conflict detection
Group calls (coming soon)
4-hour call duration limit
Priority support

My Top Three VS Code Extensions Worth The Money

Code Time

If you’re anything like me, you surely appreciate a good data visualisation of how you spent your time during coding. Personally, analyzing the graphs helps me improve my time management and better organize my work - that’s why I love time tracking tools, I use them for my personal projects and encourage my team to use one as well. Recently we’ve been experimenting with Code Time 🕰

Code Time is an Open Source plugin for automatic programming metrics and time tracking in Visual Studio Code on JetBrains. Its advanced features can provide you with detailed feedback on how productive you are at work (a big plus for a slick design!).

It has a lot of cool features that help you minimise distractions, find out your most productive time of the day and break down your coding stats (code time by project, lines of code and keystrokes.) With Teams plan, you can defend code time, see the impact of meetings, and improve work-life balance across your entire team, while your data is always private - when you create a team, you will only see aggregated and anonymized summary data at the team level—available to everyone on that team. In addition, to protect individual privacy, the minimum team size is five members.

✅ Free plan. Includes

Fast setup in less than five minute
Key DevOps performance metrics
90-day data retention

💲 Pro plan (20$/user/month or free for Open Source). Includes

Everything in the free plan
Unlimited data retention
Custom dashboards
Automated email reporting
Monitors and alerts
EditorOps workflow automation (coming soon)

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Tabnine

Most of the dev teams are constantly looking for solutions that will boost their productivity. One of the ways to increase the efficiency of developers (and decrease frustration) is faster coding. If you are among those who are always on a hunt for tools to speed up the coding Tabnine should definitely be on your radar.

It is an AI code completion tool that indexes your code and finds statistical patterns to create customized suggestions based on how you write your own code. It allows you to code faster with fewer syntax errors and more code snippets to look into right in your IDE. The best bit is that it gets better with time as it gains more material to learn from, which brings enormous value for dev teams (as we use the same project-specific modules, APIs, code patterns and conventions, whatever the AI learns from each one of the team members is very likely useful for the rest of the team when working in the same context) 🚀

✅ Free plan. Includes

1 user
Completions based on Public Code

💲 Pro plan (12$/user/month or free for Open Source). Includes

1-50 users
Completions based on Your Code
Advanced Completions based on Public Code
Insights & Analytics
Customization Options
Priority Support

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Time is money, and when it comes to software development then well, there is no doubt about that! I hope you will find my choice of paid developer tools worth checking out and after weighing the benefits they provide you’ll agree that spending money on quality tools is worth the cost.