So here is my list of essential and nice to have extensions for web development: Auto Rename Tag The editor comes with outstanding support for TypeScript and JavaScript out of the box, so nothing to install there, unless you want to try out nightly builds of the newest language features, which I wouldn’t advise, unless you really know what you are doing. PHP is an entire universe of extensions in itself, but let’s be honest, if you can avoid PHP, you should! You will also see that I focus on TypeScript/JavaScript, rather than PHP and Ruby, despite still being web development. This is why not going overboard with the number of extensions is quite important.Īn important disclaimer I’d like to make is that I’ll try my best to be agnostic from frameworks like ReactJS, AngularJS or VueJS. It’s a text editor built with ElectronJS, so it runs on a slimmed down runtime of Chromium, so it’s quite a memory hungry piece of software. to start it up with opening up the current directory as a project folder.

Once done, go to your home folder and run code, which when used will start up Visual Studio Code, but if not installed it will kick off the installer automatically. If you want to run exclusively in WSL on Windows, my advice is to first set up WSL nicely, you can check out my popular guide on how to setup Windows Terminal, WSL and ZSH. The user version facilitates the background auto-update when you don’t have elevated privileges on the machine and the 64-bit version can address more RAM memory, offering better performance.

If on Windows, download the User and 64-bit version for your platform. To install natively on your operating system, you can head off to the download page here.

Nowadays, you have quite a few options for text editors and IDEs, but the most established and still gaining steam is Visual Studio Code, followed by WebStorm and Sublime Text. This setup guide is intended for people starting up web development and some of the best tips & tricks when working with Visual Studio Code in 2020.

Run visual studio code online