Top 5 VS Code Extensions to Boost Your Coding Productivity

As a developer, I am constantly on the lookout for solutions that can help me improve my daily workflow, so I try to keep up with the novelties on the market (another reason is to later brag about using them before it was cool).

Today I prepared for you my pick of relatively new, interesting extensions from the VS Code marketplace that have recently been growing in popularity.

My goal was to find lesser-known but high-quality extensions that can really make a difference in your developer workflow. Take a look at my list and who knows, maybe you’ll discover your next favorite tool!

GitLive

GitLive is a fantastic extension to enhance the IDE’s built-in Git functionality with real-time features such as an online presence for team members and instant merge conflict detection.

Online presence for team members: The IDE plugin adds a team sidebar/tool window where you can see who on your team is online, what issues and branches they are working on, and the changes they’ve made on those branches.

This is great for remote teams and really helps when you want to view or share work in progress without resorting to a screen share or cut and pasting snippets of code into Slack or Teams.

Instant merge conflict detection: Indicators in the gutter of your editor show the difference between your changes and the changes of others.

Update in real-time as you and your teammates edit and provide an early warning of potential merge conflicts. They are a great way to get upfront insight into the potentially overlapping work of your colleagues without interruption.

Trunk

A good tool for scalable checking, formatting, and monitoring code is many developers’ dream. If you’re among them you should check out Trunk - a fast and easy-to-use meta code checker and formatter with cool features like caching, pre-existing issue detection, a daemon, and a language server. It's managed completely via config-as-code, so you can easily pin your repo to specific versions of your linters, formatters, and static analyzers.

It will level up your code quality and consistency and you can be sure that your setup will match everyone else's on the project. It is very stable and installs in minutes and runs in your IDE, CLI, or on your CI platform.

Mintlify Doc Writer

Mintlify is a great tool for all of us who think that writing documentation is the most boring task ever. With Mintlify you can just highlight the code and see how the magic happens!

It’s super easy to use and the time it saves from auto-generating docs can be counted in hours! If you’re worried about privacy, the Mintlify team ensures that your code is fully encrypted, never stored, and never used for training.

Markmap

Markmap is an interesting extension that helps you create visualizations for your markdown files (the name of the tool is a combination of markdown and mindmap). It parses markdown content, extracts its intrinsic hierarchical structure, and renders an interactive mindmap, aka Markmap.

Among the most useful features of the tool is the possibility to preview markdown files as Markmap and the possibility to edit markdown files in a text editor and the Markmap will update on the fly, also offline. If you want to test it, you can simply load your markdown content to the try it out page and see your Markmap on the right.

Blockman

While coding, you often need to focus on specific areas and visual help with isolating code blocks might feel like a lifesaver.

Blockman is a VS Code extension for nested block highlighting which makes navigating the code super easy.

It supports a bunch of non-indented languages like JavaScript, JSX, TypeScript, TSX, C, C#, C++, Java, PHP, R, Go (Golang), Dart, Rust, Swift, PowerShell, SQL, HTML, CSS, LESS and SCSS. Additionally, it currently supports two indentation-based languages: Python and Yaml.

Thanks for reading, I hope the list of trending VS Code extensions was useful and you found something that caught your attention. Let me know what you think about my selection in the comments, it would be great to get your feedback!

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