Some Must have VS Code Extensions #1 - Bracket Pair Colorizer 2

Visual studio code is one of the best IDEs for developers. I do most of my coding in Visual Studio code. I use Visual Studio Enterprise in my office for some coding stuff. Other than that 90% of my coding happens in Visual studio code. It has been one of the most comfortable coding IDE for me. I have used the normal Visual studio Enterprise in the past for my .net coding stuff but I find VS Code more comfortable than that. It is not just the code editor alone makes VS Code special or comfortable for the users. There are some extensions that make the coding experience awesome.

Most of the JS developers prefer working with VS Code. Even if I view some tutorials online, I have seen many people using the VS Code as it is also available free of cost. We have to appreciate Microsoft for that matter. Getting back to the topic, I wanted to review some of the VS Code extensions I have installed and have been using on my VS Code. Bracket Pair Colorizer 2 is one such extension that I wanted to talk about. Before Bracket Pair Colorizer 2 there was a Version 1 available. The version 1 of the extension was also very popular and excellent to use but they made some breaking changes to Version 2 so they did not have backward compatibility and named it as Bracket Pair Colorizer.

Git Hub Link: https://github.com/CoenraadS/Bracket-Pair-Colorizer-2

How the extension works?

In programming languages like javascript and typescript, the basic coding has lots of brackets to be used. The extension provides a cool feature where every bracket is given a color to differentiate from others. The main advantage of this feature is that if we forget to close a bracket, we will be able to easily recognize. There is an inbuilt feature in VS Code which creates automatic closing brackets whenever we open a bracket. Apart from that if we intentionally try to add additional brackets, the color feature will help us recognize where the opening is and where we should be doing the closing.

More than a feature to help us use brackets, I would say that the extension increases the readability of the code. For example, if it takes some time for a developer to read code and understand what the code does, with the help of brackets it is, even more, easier to recognize the start of the code blocks and end of the code blocks thus making it readable saving lots of time for the developers. There is also a configuration option available where the user can choose which color they would like to use and which tokens they would like to match.

Contributions to the project

This extension is an open-source project and there are many contributors already to the project in the form of finding issues and doing some pull requests. I quickly checked the repository and the list of issues reported. One of the recent issues reported was related to performance in the Darwin operating system where the application takes high CPU load. I'm not sure if that was the case for me as well because I did not check that out. But overall it looks like there are lots of contributions coming through to make the project one of the interesting projects for the VS Code users.

Something that I admired from the repository was that the explanations about the project and the usability were also explained very well. The extension settings and commands were also neatly explained in the repository's readme document. There was also a Release notes link detailing the changelog and the different versions that were released. Though they mentioned that the new release is a breaking change, they did explain why it had to be a breaking change and how they have made things better.

I'm able to see 27 forks already on the project and over 541,321 downloads in the VS Code making it one of the most used extensions in the VS Code. I think people have forked the code to make something awesome or a personalized version of Bracket Pair Colorizer 2. On a final note, I consider this to be one of the musts to have extensions for the VS Code users to make your coding experience wonderful.