Between work and school at the moment, my progress through the HTML5/CSS3 learning course in YouTube has been slow, but I’m making progress. While most of what I’ve learned is what I already know, there have been some new concepts I have not touched yet such as HTML Forms. However, one item I’ve been learning a lot more about has nothing to do with HTML5 or CSS3. It is Visual Studio Code.

Now, I’ve been technically using Visual Studio Code for a few years now, just never to the extent of how I’m now using to write my web code for the HTML5/CSS3 course. I’ve used it somewhat for helping write SQL queries and saving a local copy of a C# class/method I’m working on. However, this is the first time I’ve really started using it with extensions beyond the language support. A few great extensions that I’m using for web design, but I’ve started using for my C#, are Bracket Pair Colorizer 2 and indent-rainbow. I can’t say how often I’ve spent more time trying to match brackets and fix mismatch indents then actually writing code. For web design, I’m also using Highlight Matching Tag, Live Server, and Prettier – Code formatter. Live Server is honestly extremely simple, but a heck of a time saver when making page edits and not having to constantly reload pages. Prettier isn’t exactly necessary as I do feel getting into a better formatting habit is more ideal, I’m not perfect and overlook indents from time to time. Just nice to make sure I have a more consistent format without to much fuss. Although none of these are necessary, they make coding so much nicer.

My latest fun with VS Code has to do with Microsoft finally bringing it to Raspberry Pi. I’ve been sitting on a Raspberry Pi 3 for a while now not really knowing what to do with it. With my decision to start focusing on web development, I figured why not use as a lightweight web server. Now, I can use VS Code on my Raspberry Pi to help work on site code. Set it up with SSH, VNC, VS Code, and Apache2. Not sure what kind of site I’ll try to build first, but now I’ve got a perfect lightweight Linux testing environment to play around with. If I don’t want to VNC into the Pi, I just found out that I can use VS Code on my desktop to remote into my Pi’s file system to also edit files over SSH with the Remote Development extension. Granted, I don’t think you need the entire Remote Development extension as you can get the individual components, but I figured why not. Just need to play around with it more, but I’ve already setup a connection and it really nice. Side note, I kept getting this error when trying to connect initially: Resolver error: The process tried to write to a nonexistent pipe. Found a nice fix on Stack Overflow that worked perfect for me.

In all, I really feel that Visual Studio Code really is the ultimate open source editor. It’s free and has one heck of an extension library. Also, you can get it across Windows, OSX, and Linux. If you are looking for a good editor that you can also use for code development, I strongly recommend giving Visual Studio Code a shot.