VS Code Extensions, IDEs, Softwares, Chrome Extensions

A list of tools that I use

April, 12, 2024

Chrome Extensions

  • Viewport Resizer: Device Emulator & Website Testing Tool. I use this tool to test my websites on different viewports, simulating different devices. Chrome developer tool can do the same thing, but I like this one more.
  • Octotree: This tool lets you preview files in a GitHub repo. To view each individual folder on GitHub, I’d normally have to click into each one to see all the files. However, GitHub can be slow, so navigating between folders can take quite a bit of time

VS Codes Extensions and Settings

  • Web Developments
    • Crucial: HTML CSS Support (HTML Intellisense), Auto Rename Tag.
    • Tailwind CSS IntelliSense and Tailwind Docs. I used to hate Tailwind because I felt like I had less control over things. Now, I've come to appreciate it.
    • CSS Peak: peak straight into css, no need to jump around.
    • Github Actions. I use this tool to automate some stuff for my website.
    • Workspace Settings. Note that the HTML autocomplete does not work with React or Next js by default, so you should enable it manually via settings.json. I also use an indentation of 2 spaces instead of 4 when writing web projects. 
       {
  "emmet.includeLanguages": {
      "javascript": "javascriptreact"
  },
  "editor.tabSize": 2,
  "editor.insertSpaces": true,
  "editor.detectIndentation": false
}
  • Decorations
    • indent-rainbow: a tool that keep your code organized by coloring indentations. When you first install it, it will have very thick indentation lines. This look a bit ugly to me, but fortunately, you can adjust that in settings.json. This is my ideal setting: 
       "indentRainbow.colors": [
    "rgba(255,255,64,0.3)",
    "rgba(127,255,127,0.3)",
    "rgba(255,127,255,0.3)",
    "rgba(79,236,236,0.3)"
  ],
  "indentRainbow.indicatorStyle": "light",
  "editor.guides.bracketPairs": "active",
  "indentRainbow.excludedLanguages": [
      "plaintext"
  ],
  "indentRainbow.lightIndicatorStyleLineWidth": 1,
  "editor.renderWhitespace": "boundary",
  "indentRainbow.errorColor": "rgba(128,32,32,0)",
    • Material Icon Theme: A very wide variety of very nice-looking folder and file themes.
    • Prettier - Code formatter: I use this extension mostly for web development, where lots of indentation are required.
    • Bracket Pair Colorization Toggler : Useful for languages that use curly braces {}.
    • VS Code Pets
      vscode-pet-demo
  • System Programming
    • C/C++ IntelliSense, C/C++ Extension Pack, and C/C++ Theme
    • CMake and CMake Tools. I've always had a love-hate relationship with CMake. It makes zero sense and is very painful to use, but it's the most popular (and best?) tool we have. These extensions help me write CMake more efficiently, since they rebuild everything every time I made changes to my CMake script. 
      cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.18)
project(FFT_project CXX)
set(CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD 17)

find_package(fmt CONFIG REQUIRED)
add_executable(main main.cpp)
target_link_libraries(main PRIVATE fmt::fmt)
      Test the extension with the script above for the FMT library.
    • Rust Analyzer and Rust Syntax.
    • MASM/TASM: run assembly directly in VS Code without a compiler.
    • Nsight Visual Studio Code Edition: useful for CUDA programming.
    • VS Code's Shader languages support: shaders highlighters for GLSL, HLSL, CG.
    • Makefile Tools
  • Dev Tools
    • IntelliCode and IntelliCode API Usage Examples.
    • Docker
    • Git Graph.
  • Others
    • audio-preview: play and display audio files' information.
    • vscode-pdf: view pdf docs within vs code
    • Markdown All in One.
    • Code Spell Checker.

Desktop Softwares

  • Windhawk: Windows 11 sucks, as it does not allow you to customize even simple things like the size of the taskbar, so I used this software just to do that. It also has a lot of other cool tools that you can install on your machine.
  • Audacity: an audio editor I used to edit sound files.
  • Gnome Shell Extension: Ubuntu customization.

Hardware

  • Windows Laptop: Lenovo Legion Legion Pro 5, Intel Core i9-14900HX, 32GB RAM, 2TB SSD, RTX 4070. This is the laptop I use for most of my work, school, and games. Damn good deal from black friday.
  • Linux Laptop: ASUS ROG Zephyrus S GX531GX, Intel Core i7-8750H, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, GTX 1070 max-q. This is my old windows laptop, but I deleted windows and installed Ubuntu. Thin laptop but horrible battery life. I now use it to do system programming development.
  • Keyboard: CORSAIR K65 plus wireless 75% RGB.
  • Tablet: Ipad Air 4th gen, 64GB.
  • Headphone: Sony WH-1000XM3. Soundproof, wireless, a headphone bought a long time ago.
  • Earbuds: Airpods 3. I prefer this one over the pro version because it has a longer battery life.