Visual Studio Code, “VSCode”, is the hugely featureful successor to projects like Atom & Visual Studio itself, the extensibility of VSCode is key to this success and I’m going to share what I do to make VSCode work for me.

Extensions

Specific

Themes

I use Atom One Light and Material Icon Theme .

My preferred dark theme is Darcula Theme 🦇

Special mentions to Light Pink Theme , a warrior’s theme.

Settings

  • Remote.SSH: Lockfiles in Tmp avoids locking issues on network filesystems
  • Remote.SSH: Remote Server Listens On Socket feels more secure
  • Git: Autofetch fetch changes automatically
  • Terminal > Integrated: Scrollback set to 10,000
  • Terminal > Integrated: Font Family I set this to Hack font
  • Terminal > Integrated: Allow Chords off, allows ctrl+k to work in Terminal
  • Terminal > Integrated: Copy On Selection on, saves having to press Ctrl+Shift+C
  • Terminal > Integrated: Default Location set to editor, new terminals appear as an editor tab instead of an overlay
  • HTML: Auto Closing Tags disabled, triggers excessively
  • Window: New Window Dimensions inherit, so all your windows are your preferred size
  • Editor: Word Wrap on, obviously
  • Editor: Word Based Suggestions this gets in the way of writing documentation/blogs
  • Diff Editor: Ignore Trim Whitespace ignores leading/trailing whitespace changes

GitLens

Most of these are configured in Gitlens’ startup screen:

  • Gitlens > Current Line: Enabled disabled, don’t really need to know who authored every single line, too much visual spam
  • Gitlens > Code Lens: Enabled disabled, same as above but adds lines above function blocks, even more visual spam
  • Gitlens > Code Lens > Authors: Command false, disable popup when accidentally clicking the author info
  • Gitlens > Hovers: Enabled disabled, disable git info popup when mousing over a line/function, makes it impossible to point to code on a screenshare

I hope you find these suggestions useful, please let me know if any of these stop working.