Before graduating, I would like to impart a final resource on my fellow students at Flatiron School. Over the course of my time in the program, I have picked up various extensions and tools that have helped me to streamline and enhance my workflow. Following is a list of my favorite VS Code Extensions and Tools:
Git Graph
For my final project, I wanted to practice a git workflow that mirrored a professional environment. To do this, I made my main git branch my “production” branch, and kept my production environments on Heroku and Netlify pointed to this branch. I created a second branch for development, “build”, and used this branch to work on updates. Once I felt that the build branch was in a functional state, I would merge the build branch into the main branch.
Git Graph helped me visualize my workflow, but more importantly, it helped me rollback to previous versions when I needed to. Rather than searching the git log for the right hash and entering the git checkout command, Git Graph provided an easy to read GUI where I could see all of my commits and branches with ease. The process for a checkout with Git Graph is simple… point and click.
TODO Highlight
When working through a project, I have found it useful to comment working notes directly in the code so that I can reference a nearby line and keep eyes on both the note and the code simultaneously. The issue I ran into was that I was consistently using Search and Find for notes and I didn’t always include the same terminology or language. For instance, I might preface a comment with “TODO — …” or “QUESTION — “. Different prefixes required different attention and different actions. When I had the opportunity to meet with my section lead, I would search through all of my comments and notes for anything relevant. Inevitably, I would always miss something and I would have to wait for the next office hours to keep moving.
This extension made keeping track of commented notes so much easier! Rather than starting a new session by finding all of my comments from the day before, I could simply use the keyboard shortcut command+shift+p and arrow down to “TODO-Highlight: List highlighted annotations”. This would allow me to output my notes by category, or all at once. Which then let me quickly navigate to the various portions of my code that required attention.
This extension was a game changer, and I know that it would help many other Flatiron Students.
Raycast
Finally, I’m going to close out on what I have found to be the most powerful tool in my kit. This launcher can replace the traditional “Spotlight” feature, and provides tons of additional functionality. You can save code snippets that auto populate if you provide a keyword, you can cycle through your clipboard history for that screenshot that you took a day ago, and so much more. The extensions store has a ton of additional scripts and features that make life so much easier! Heres a list of some of the Raycast features that I have found useful:
Snippets/TextExpander
Clipboard History
Brew extension (For searching and installing HomeBrew formulae)
Programming Cheatsheets quick reference
Datetime conversions
Dash search
And all of that is immediately accessible via the Mac Spotlight shortcut command + space. There’s really far too much to explore on this one, so I’m going to leave it by suggesting that you check it out yourself.
Happy coding!