More VS Code Tips

In my previous article in CODE Magazine https://www.codemag.com/Article/240803 1/VS-Code-Tips), shared some of my favorite tips when working with VS Code. As wrote the article, realized that was just brain dumping tidbits I've gathered over many years of using VS Code. The list seemed endless. But what about some larger chunks of tips? Things that every developer

- Sahil Malilk

uses and are built into VS Code that can supercharge your development? I thought it might be nice to take a logical break and come back with those larger chunks of items.

Git

These days, if you’re a developer, you most likely use Git. It has sort of become the de facto source control mechanism, whether it’s GitHub, or Azure DevOps, or anything else, chances are you use the Git command quite a bit. It’s therefore natural that VS Code offers some fabulous Git integration.

Right out of the box, VS Code has some Git features built into it. To demonstrate many of these features, I’ll use the source code for MSAL Python hosted at https://github.​com/ AzureAD/microsoft-authentication-library-for-python. But feel free to use any moderately realistic Git-based repo.

VS Code’s Git integration can be accessed by clicking on the sidebar button shown in Figure 1.

You can click on that button and VS Code prompts you to either clone a repo or open a folder. Either way, you can work with Git-based repos right inside VS Code. For now, I’ll clone the MSAL python repo and open it in VS Code. I made a minor modification to the README.md file and added a file, and immediately VS Code’s Git integration shows me that I have changes. In fact, right through VS Code, I can perform common functions, such as staging my changes, reverting my changes, or committing the changes, and give it a decent commit message. I can also click on individual files and view a diff. Additionally, each file shows me a nomenclature showing whether a file is modified, untracked, or deleted. You can see in Figure 2 that I have an untracked and a modified file.

But we know that Git is much more powerful than this basic stuff. If you click the triple dots on the corner of the source control window, you can see a pretty interesting menu. This can be seen in Figure 3.