VS Code Extension of the Day: Paste JSON as code
- This is the 8th post in a multipart series.
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You have some data in JSON. You want a class to work with it in your TypeScript, Python, Go, Ruby, C#, Java, Swift, Rust, Kotlin, C++, Flow, Objective-C, JavaScript, Elm code or you want JSON Schema. What do you do?
You could do it by hand, or you get this extension which does it for you. And if you don’t use VSCode (why are you here), they also have a website which can do this for you too.
VS Code Extension of the Day: Settings Sync
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Settings sync is the first extension I always install as it allows me to restore my settings AND extensions. It uses GitHub gists to store the config, so you have a slightly annoying setup process initially but once done, each time you change a setting or extension it updates it to the gist. Then when you get a new install, it pulls down the settings and installs all the extensions you had and you can get everything setup really easily and quickly.
VS Code Extension of the Day: Editor Config
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If you work in a team where choice is important, you may find everyone has a different editor. Today our team uses VSCode, Atom & IntelliJ. Editor Config is a set of extensions for many editors which tries to unify things like tab vs. spaces, trailing spaces, empty lines at the end etc… Think of this as your editor linting as you go. Unfortunately, support is limited for what can be done, but a lot of editors and IDEs are supported.
VS Code Extension of the Day: Dracula Official
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So not an extension so much as a theme, Dracula is a great dark theme for Code. It is a little more playful in its colours too which is a plus but what makes it stand out is the Dracula community
There are tons of extensions to add Dracula to everything. I have my slack, terminal.app and IntelliJ all configured as well. It is really great to have the consistency everywhere.
VS Code Extension of the Day: Code Runner
- This is the 4th post in a multipart series.
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Code Runner is a lightweight code execution tool. I think of it as the middle ground between a REPL environment and actually running code normally. So you can execute a single file or even highlight specific lines and execute just them. It supports an amazing array of languages C, C++, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Perl, Perl 6, Ruby, Go, Lua, Groovy, PowerShell, BAT/CMD, BASH/SH, F# Script, F# (.NET Core), C# Script, C# (.NET Core), VBScript, TypeScript, CoffeeScript, Scala, Swift, Julia, Crystal, OCaml Script, R, AppleScript, Elixir, Visual Basic .NET, Clojure, Haxe, Objective-C, Rust, Racket, AutoHotkey, AutoIt, Kotlin, Dart, Free Pascal, Haskell, Nim, D
I personally use it all the time with JS & Kotlin. I haven’t needed to change any settings, though code-runner.runInTerminal sounds interesting.
VS Code Extension of the Day: Bracket Pair Colorizer
- This is the 3rd post in a multipart series.
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Initially, this extension allows your brackets, {} [] (), to be set to a unique colour per pair. This makes it really easy to spot when you are goofed up and removed a closing bracket. Behind the obvious is a lot of really awesome extras in it. You can have the brackets highlight when you click on them when you click on one the pair with bracketPairColorizer.highlightActiveScope and you can also add an icon to the gutter of the other pair bracketPairColorizer.showBracketsInGutter which makes it trivial to work our the size of the scope.
It also adds a function bracket-pair-colorizer.expandBracketSelection which is unbound by default but will allow you to select the entire area in the current bracket selection. Do it again, and it will include the next scope. For example, you can select the entire function, then the entire class.
VS Code Extension of the Day: Bookmarks
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The bookmarks extension adds another feature from Fat VS to code, the ability to bookmark to a place in a document/file/code and be able to quickly navigate backwards and forwards to it. One important setting that I think you should change is bookmarks.navigateThroughAllFiles - set that to true and you can jump to any bookmark in your project, with false (the default) you can only navigate to bookmarks in the current file.
Learning Kotlin: Operators don't need to mean one thing
- This is the 18th post in a multipart series.
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Following on from the previous post we looked at operators and being able to use them yourself by implementing the relevant operator methods. The first part I want to cover in this second post is the Unary operators +, -, and !.
When I was learning this, the term unary jumped out as one I did not immediately recognise, but a quick Wikipedia read it became clear. For example, if you use a negative unary with a positive number, it becomes a negative number… It is primary school maths with a fancy name.
One thing to remember about operators is it is totally up to you what they mean, so, for example, let’s start with a simple pet class to allow us to define what type of pet we have.
package blogcode
enum class animal {
dog,
cat
}
data class pet(val type: animal);
fun main(args: Array) {
val myPet = pet(animal.dog)
println(myPet)
}
this produces pet(type=dog)
Now, maybe in my domain, the reverse of a dog is a cat, so I can do this to make this reflect my domain:
package blogcode
enum class animal { dog, cat }
data class pet(val type: animal) { operator fun not() : pet = when(this.type) { animal.cat -> pet(animal.dog) animal.dog -> pet(animal.cat) } }
fun main(args: Array
This produces pet(type=cat)
And this is the core thing, that while a Unary has a specific purpose normally you can totally use it the way that makes sense. This is really awesome and powerful but it doesn’t stop there.
Normally when we think of something like the Unary not with a boolean, it goes from true to false (or vice versa), but it remains a boolean. There is nothing stating it has to be that way:
package sadev
enum class animal {
dog,
cat
}
data class pet(val type: animal) {
operator fun not() :String = “BEN”
}
fun main(args: Array) {
val myPet = pet(animal.dog)
val notPet = !myPet
println(“myPet is ${myPet::class.simpleName} with a value of ${myPet}”)
println(“notPet is ${notPet::class.simpleName} with a value of ${notPet}”)
}
In the above, the output is
myPet is pet with a value of pet(type=dog)
notPet is String with a value of BEN
In short, the not of a dog pet is actually a string with the value of ben. I have no idea how this is useful to real development, but it is amazing that Kotlin is flexible enough to empower it.
VS Code Extension of the Day: Better Comments
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The Better Comments extension will help you create more human-friendly comments in your code.
This extension reminds me of the similar functionality in Fat VS, unfortunately without the cool list view for //todo comments.
VS Code - Extension of the Day
Over at the ZA Tech Slack I have been posting an extension of the day in the #VSCode channel. It is my way of sharing cool things with the group and also forcing me to spend a bit of time reviewing my extensions and figuring them out a bit better and since not everyone follows that, here is the more permanent home for these mini posts on cool VS Code extensions.