Five VS Code Extensions I Use Every Day
My VS Code setup has settled down a lot over the past year. Here are the five extensions that have genuinely stuck.
1. Error Lens — Displays errors and warnings inline, right next to the offending code. No more hovering over squiggly lines.
2. GitLens — Supercharges the built-in Git support. Inline blame, rich diff views, and a commit graph that makes navigating history genuinely pleasant.
3. Pretty TypeScript Errors — TypeScript errors are notoriously verbose and hard to parse. This extension reformats them into something human-readable. An instant quality-of-life upgrade for any TS project.
4. REST Client — Send HTTP requests directly from .http files in the editor. I use this constantly for API testing and it keeps everything version-controlled alongside the code.
5. Todo Tree — Scans your workspace for TODO, FIXME, HACK, etc. and surfaces them in a sidebar tree view. Stops those drive-by comments from disappearing forever.
Honourable mentions: Tailwind CSS IntelliSense, Vim keybindings (yes, really), and the GitHub Copilot integration.
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Network Entropology (n.): The study of chaos in data network systems; the discipline concerned with understanding how order degrades, complexity accumulates, and entropy propagates across connected infrastructure, and the practice of bringing order back to it. A field that exists whether or not its practitioners know they are in it.