Voice of a Developer: VSCode - Part Six

JavaScript is a language of the Web. This series of articles will talk about my observations learned during my decade of software development experience with JavaScript.

Before moving further let us look at the previous articles of the series:

I believe a good editor makes life easy for a developer. My favorite editor is VSCode.


“Visual Studio Code is a lightweight but powerful source code editor which runs on your desktop and is available for Windows, OS X and Linux. It comes with built-in support for JavaScript, TypeScript and Node.js and has a rich ecosystem of extensions for other languages (C++, C#, Python, PHP) and runtimes.”.

In the last series I talked about a few editors, but what makes VSCode awesome? In my point of view VSCode is breath of fresh air. Let’s deep dive:

Command Palette

A very handy tool so developers can fire commands from editor only. Press Ctrl+Shift+P or F1 and a pop up will open,



Now you can search your respective command, ex,



Extensions

It supports 30+ programming languages out-of-the-box. You can install extensions by opening Command Palette.



Select “Install Extension” & you will see a huge list there,



You can find extensions available online at marketplace to install:

VS Code also supports APIs that allow you to develop extensions. You can use JavaScript or TypeScript to build your own extensions and debug and test them in VS Code

Tasks

I am in love with this feature of VSCode. You can write your own tasks and VSCode is intelligent to determine and show in task runner list. I have chosen Grunt task runner. Before we move forward, please install NODE & NPM to install node packages. To install grunt use below command

npm grunt install


Open Command Palette and choose “Tasks: Configure Task Runner”



VSCode will create tasks.json file. Delete everything and add following code for Grunt task runner