A while back in 2016 or so I published an article over at Pluralsight about 15 editors that at the time were on my top list of editors. I mostly used Atom.io for my projects and felt it was pretty easy to use and had the flexibility to become robust enough for most projects.

However recently I decided to bite the bullet and try out Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code (vscode). I have to say that I am actually pleasantly surprised. I decided to try it because of my new found love for TypeScript and Angular, and vscode seemed to be the best ‘free’ option to support TypeScript.

Out of the box it works great for simple TypeScript projects, and the integrated terminal works excellent on both MacOS and Windows. However I find that VSCode truly shines when you add a few extensions to it. I’ll list those out here below and go over them quickly.

  1. TSLint
    • Integrates the tslint linter for the TypeScript language into VS Code. Extremely helpful at detecting and helping fix TypeScript issues.
  2. Angular Language Services
    • This extension provides a rich editing experience for Angular templates, both inline and external templates. This extension is brought to you by members of the Angular team. It is fantastic at helping write solid code in the html templates.
  3. Angular v4 TypeScript Snippets
    • Angular snippets that follow the official style guide, for TypeScript, templates, and RxJS.
  4. Bracket Pair Colorizor
    • This extension allows matching brackets to be identified with colors. This is super helpful when you have nested functions and objects.
  5. Path Intellisense
    • Visual Studio Code plugin that autocompletes filenames.
  6. Debugger for Chrome
    • It’s a Debugger for VSCode that’s for Chrome…
  7. Bootstrap 3 Snippets
    • Emmet for bootstrap 3 components. Quickly build bootstrap layouts with autogenerated components from getbootstrap.com
  8. One Dark Pro
    • Brings me my Atom.io style and theme to VSCode

Since I’m apparently doing lists now, here is a list of things that I like about VSCode

  • Open Source
  • Extensible
  • Native Git Support
  • Emmet out of the box
  • Built in debugger
  • Built in Terminal
  • Keyboard binding’s from other text editors
  • Highly Customizable
  • IntelliSense

I’ve been able to work with Angular projects like never before with VSCode, and it looks like I have found my new favorite editor. If you haven’t tried it out yet, do yourself a favor and go check it out!

Download VSCode