VSConfig

Welcome to VSConfig. The place to learn VSCode!

Why learn VSCode?

VSCode is the most popular code editor out there, and while being popular doesn’t mean being good, being popular does have benefits. Microsoft gives it a lot of attention and development time to maintain and increase this popularity. Its extensions are written in JavaScript, the most popular programming language, and the extension ecosystem is huge. It has support for basically every language and framework you need…

There are other code editors out there that are objectively better at certain things and provide tremendous power in terms of customization and extensibility, but are notorious for being new-comer unfriendly and for having large barriers of entry such as emacs and vim. Although I should mention that Neovim does address many of the issues of the original vim and is becoming quite popular… in fact, one of my must-have extensions for VSCode uses an embedded instance of neovim giving me the best parts of both.

Both emacs and neovim have so-called “distros” available, which are bundles of extensions and configurations, that really do get you up and running much faster as a new user. In my opinion however, these distros only delay the inevitable need for a deep understanding of the editor as something of a run time environment for the configuration language in order to truly get it to do exactly what you want… without this understanding you will frequently find yourself on Stack Overflow and ChatGPT or otherwise spending lots of time debugging your editor instead of working on your ideas.

Other editors provide a much better out-of-the-box experience but have their own drawbacks… Visual Studio has the best C++ and C# debugging that I’ve experienced. JetBrains IDE’s have rave reviews though I have not used them personally. These very featurful editors come at the cost of heavy system resource consumption, long startup times and relatively limited customizability. JetBrains has native support on Windows, Mac and Linux while Visual Studio is only supported on Windows.

On the other hand, there are many text editors out there that are extremely lightweight and easy to use such as the fantastic Notepad++ and tried-and-true MS Notepad. While Notepad++ is extensible, it is a Windows-only application and Microsoft has decided to poison Notepad with hype-fueled A.I. asscrap.

VSCode sits in a great middleground between all these things. It:

Sure, VSCode has its drawbacks. But in my experience, these drawbacks are largely overcome with a bit of tweaking or are overshadowed by its benefits.

Why use VSConfig?

I was looking for documentation for specific settings, commands and shortcuts but became frustrated with the consistent lack of descriptive results from Microsoft. So the goal of VSConfig is to grow into the definitive central source for great documention for each and every setting available in VSCode!

VSConfig is meant to be easy to use an navigate. On the left, there is a navbar that makes it easy to find what you’re looking for. For example, following Settings > Editor > Word Wrap should bring you do the documentation for the setting:

{
  "editor.wordwrap": ...,
}

Up top, there is a breadcrumb nav bar that lets you quickly navigate documentation for VSCode’s features without having to use your browser’s “Previous Page” functionality.

Each post is Tagged with one or more keywords. You can view each and every Tag by click the Tags link at the bottom of the left side nav bar. This will bring you to a list page of Tags. Clicking on one of these Tags will bring you to a list page of every post associated with that Tag.

You can search for content on this website by using the Search feature in the nav bar. For now, this Search will open up a new tab using Google’s site-specific search feature.

I recommend having VSCode open to the side and trying things out as you read about them… you are encouraged to “Try it out!”