In my three and a half years of short development career, I mainly used PHPStorm IDE to build projects and I can say that I was quite satisfied with PHPStorm.
But from the past 8-9 months, our entire team have been shifted our development completely to VSCode and we have our own good reasons to do that.
Now why we ditched PHPSTORM for VSCode
- Costs
VSCode is a free and open-source platform while you need to pay for PHPStorm
- Speed
I love PHPStorm even now but when it comes to speed it cannot match with VSCode at all.
- Dedicated to only PHP programming
If your development ain’t dedicated to the only PHP then you should use VSCode as it’s not an IDE but more of an editor that you can customize as per your development needs.
As I’ve said earlier VSCode is purely a code editor without any default extensions. Because of that when you move from PHPStorm to VSCode, you will feel that you’re missing out on so many useful things that could make your development smooth.
To get an almost near Experience of an IDE, our team loaded the VsCode with so many useful extensions. In this blog, I am sharing those useful extensions.
Here is the list:
Essential Extensions
GitLens supercharges the Git capabilities built into Visual Studio Code. It helps you to visualize code authorship at a glance via Git blame annotations and code lens, seamlessly navigate and explore Git repositories, gain valuable insights via powerful comparison commands, and so much more.
Syntax highlighing for Apache conf files in the Visual Studio Code. Ported from ApacheConf.tmLanguage.
Automatically add HTML/XML close tag, same as Visual Studio IDE or Sublime Text does.
Automatically add HTML/XML close tag, same as Visual Studio IDE or Sublime Text does.
Automatically rename paired HTML/XML tag, same as Visual Studio IDE does.
This extension styles css/web colors found in your document.
This extension will give option to Copy Relative Path from a File.
Debug your JavaScript code in the Chrome browser, or any other target that supports the Chrome Debugger protocol.
VSCode .env syntax highlighting.
This extension ports popular Eclipse keyboard shortcuts to Visual Studio Code. Eclipse key bindings are provided for Windows, Linux and macOS.
This extension adds Flow support for VS Code. Flow is a static type checker, designed to find type errors in JavaScript programs. Follow the official guide to get started.
View git log, file history, compare branches or commits with the help of this extension.
Creates supplied diff output (i.e. 'a patch') and applies it to files.
Give extra stash abilities to Code. Visually browse stashes, review and extract changes. Get all stash commands and more.
Language support for .gitignore files. Lets you pull .gitignore files from the https://github.com/github/gitignore repository.
Inspired by GitHub extension for Visual Studio, this extension provide the feature that Go To current file's online link in browser and Copy the link in clipboard.
Markdown linting and style checking for Visual Studio Code.
Jump to a source code line in Github, Bitbucket, Gitlab, VisualStudio.com !
Visual Studio Code plugin that autocompletes filenames.
Prettier is an opinionated code formatter. It enforces a consistent style by parsing your code and re-printing it with its own rules that take the maximum line length into account, wrapping code when necessary.
This extension will help you to Easily switch between projects.
This extension allows configuring commands that get run whenever a file is saved in vscode.
Synchronize Settings, Snippets, Themes, File Icons, Launch, Keybindings, Workspaces and Extensions Across Multiple Machines Using GitHub Gist.
Highlight TODO, FIXME and other annotations within your code.
Sometimes you forget to review the TODOs you've added while coding before you publish the code to production. So this extension will highlight them and reminds you that there are notes or things not done yet.
Manage todo lists with ease. Powerful, easy to use and customizable.
PHP based Extensions
This Visual Studio Code plugin provides an interface to Composer dependency manager for PHP. It also provides schema validation for composer.json configuration files.
This extension is a debug adapter between VS Code and XDebug by Derick Rethan. XDebug is a PHP extension (a .so file on Linux and a .dll on Windows) that needs to be installed on your server.
Advanced Autocompletion and Refactoring support for PHP. This is just the VS Code extension that spawns the actual language server. The language server itself is implemented purely in PHP in its own repository.
Crane is a productivity enhancement extension for the Visual Studio Code that provides code-completion for PHP. It has zero dependencies and largely works with projects of any size. It is still in development, and as such there may be bugs and/or missing features.
PHP Namespace Resolver can import and expand your class. You can also sort your imported classes by line length or in alphabetical order.
Laravel based Extensions
Run Laravel Artisan commands from within Visual Studio Code.
Laravel blade snippets and syntax highlight support for Visual Studio Code.
A set of Laravel Helper Snippets for Visual Studio Code.
JS based Extensions
Adds JS Babel es6/es7 syntax coloring.
Integrates ESLint JavaScript into VS Code. The extension uses the ESLint library installed in the opened workspace folder.
Visual Studio Code plugin that autocompletes npm modules in import statements.
Vue JS Based Extension
Vue tooling for VS Code, powered by vue-language-server.
Hope these extensions help you to make your development more productive.
Happy Coding
