Issue #80  (Extension Developer UX Guidelines)11/01/23

If you're a VS Code extension author, or if you're interested in doing extension development at some point, you'll want to become familiar with the VS Code team's official UX Guidelines for extension authors.

As they describe on the overview page:
 
The overview page explains the architecture of the VS Code UI, dividing its parts into two primary categories: Containers (e.g. Primary Sidebar, Activity Bar, Editor) and Items (e.g. Toolbars, Status Bar Item).
 
One of the useful features in the UX Guidelines is the "Do's and Don'ts" section included with each of the individual pages. For example, the image below shows the Do's and Don'ts for the Editor Actions.
 
Overall the guidelines are important to follow, but naturally these are still optional. As an example, the Notifications section recommends that extension authors "Don't send repeated notifications" and "Don't use for promotion".

I do appreciate that the API is so open (i.e. you're not technically restricted from doing the "Don'ts"). These Do's and Don'ts are evidently a recent addition, being added to the guidelines in 2022. I would assume this was the result of collecting feedback from users over a long period of time, noting the way the API for extension development has been abused over the years.

So if you're getting into extension development, the guidelines are a good reference to review once in a while or possibly before each time you build or work on a VS Code extension.

Now on to this week's hand-picked links!
 

VS Code Tools

Flexoki — A nice color scheme that's available for use in a variety of tools and IDEs, including VS Code. There are links to the config files that you can add to your settings for whatever IDE you're using.

Visual Studio Code Extension Tester — A package designed to help you run UI tests for your VS Code extensions using selenium-webdriver, the popular browser automation library.

AI is Getting Smarter. Are You? — AI won’t take your job. Someone using AI will. Best time to level up? Yesterday. Second best? Right now. Luckily, there’s Brilliant — the interactive app that makes it easy to master concepts in math, data, and computer science in just minutes a day.  Sponsor 

IntelliJ IDEA Keybindings — A VS Code extension that ports IntelliJ IDEA Keybindings, with support for IntelliJ Ultimate, WebStorm, PyCharm, PHP Storm, etc.

VS Code Articles

Things I Wish Someone Would Have Told Me About Configuring VS Code — From someone who's used VS Code for five years, providing some tips on the .vscode folder, enabled extensions, the built-in terminal, and Git.

Creating and Exporting Project-Specific Configurations in VS Code — A good article for those who use VS Code in a team environment and want to share project-specific configurations with others.

ChatGPT for Enterprise Databases — Chat with your enterprise databases using secure generative AI and empower business users in your team to do their own data analyses in seconds.   Sponsor 

Boost Your Productivity with 10 Must-Know VS Code Shortcuts and Tricks — Not the usual set of shortcut suggestions, so you might find a few here that will be new to you and apparently the author uses them almost every day.

Best of the Rest

Zettlr — A privacy-first, open-source writing app for Windows, Mac, and Linux, with support for Markdown and industry-standard citations.

Vimspector — A multi-language debugging plugin for Vim that works as a sort of middleware for your language debugger.

Rust Playground — An online code sandbox for Rust that provides the top 100 most downloaded crates from crates.io, the crates from the Rust Cookbook, and all of their dependencies.

Suggestions?

If you have any link suggestions, including a tool, article, or other resources related to VS Code or another IDE, send it via DM on X: @LouisLazaris or just hit reply on this email.

That's it for this issue.

Happy VS Coding!
Louis
VSCode.Email
@LouisLazaris