According to StackOverflow, Visual Studio Code is the most popular developer enviornment in use, with it taking up about 75% of the market share as of 2022! That's for a good reason too! It's open source, easy to use an lightweight while still being feature rich. It's a powerful editor, especially for web developers.

But, one of it's most interesting features is it's flexibility. It's extension marketplace. There are literally thousands of extensions on the marketplace with more coming out everyday. From UI themes to programming language support, debugging tools, coding utilities, Git integration/toolsets, and even media players! There's something useful for everyone. Extensions are really important to customizing your software to suit your personal needs.

General Web Dev Essentials

Everything you need no matter what libraries and frameworks you are using.

• htmltagwrap
  • Wraps your selection in HTML tags. Very handy for when you, for example, want to wrap a large section with a div, you simply highlight the section and hit your hotkey.
• Auto Rename Tag
  • Automatically renames paired HTML/XML tags. For example if you have <p></p> and you go to change it and type <div></p> in the first block, it will automatically change the closing tag to match, as such <div></div>.
• Code Spell Checker
  • A basic spell checker for VS Code that works pretty well. In my opinion, it's essential for any front end developer, but especially for website developers writing lots of HTML where you are writing lots of text.
• Prettier - Code Formatter
  • An opinionated code formatter which enforces a consistent style by parsing your code and re-printing it with its own rules that take the maximum line length into account, wrapping code when necessary.
• Intellicode
  • An AI-assisted extension that shows recommended completion items for your code context at the top of the completions list.
• Debugger for Firefox
  • An extension that allows you to run more in depth debugging in firefox using VS Code, utilizing tools such as breakpoints, injecting logging and all the other bells and whistles you expect to come with a debugger!

Other Essential Plugins

Odds and ends, that sort of thing. Perhaps you'll find something for a library or framework you use?

• ES7+ React/Redux/React-Native snippets
  • JavaScript and React/Redux snippets in ES7+ with Babel plugin features for VS Code
• Next.js React Snippets by iJS
  • A collection of snippets to make Next.js development easier. Pretty simple.
• Tailwind CSS Intellisense
  • Tailwind CSS IntelliSense provides users with advanced features such as autocomplete, syntax highlighting, and linting when writing in Tailwind.
• Headwind
  • An opinionated class sorter for Tailwind CSS. It enforces consistent ordering of classes by parsing your code and reprinting class tags to follow a given order.
• Tailwind CSS Explorer
  • Explore the classes available in your project's tailwind setup and add them to your document with the click of a button.
• PostCSS Language Support
  • Adds support for modern and experimental CSS within VS Code. PostCSS is used by many libraries such as Tailwind CSS, so it's essential for anyone using any libraries requiring it.
• Stripe for VS Code
  • Allows developers who are using Stripe to generate sample code, view API request logs, forward events to your application and use Stripe within the editor.
• Halo 3 Menu Theme
  • Okay, maybe calling it *essential *is a little bit of a stretch, but it's super cool and i thought this list would be incomplete without it.
  • This extension adds a theme to VS Code that styles it after the main menu of Halo 3.