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VSCode has a ton of extensions but very frequently there's no good information about which extensions you should actually use, and whether you need to configure

VSCode has a ton of extensions but very frequently there's no good information about which extensions you should actually use, and whether you need to configure them to get the best behavior. For example, the other day I went to install a GraphQL extension for syntax highlighting and there was something like a half-dozen competing extensions, with no good way of figuring out why I should use one versus the other. I eventually ended up picking the one that looked the simplest, because all I really wanted was syntax highlighting and nothing else.

kkarakk 8y ago
MS's attitude towards package managers has always confused me. even in vs2019, typing in Microsoft.something sometimes brings up paid extensions as the first result but not always. no way to rate an extension with an explanation in nuget(or vscode) means i'm usually googling "good extension for [x]" instead of using the package manager search
cheerlessbog 8y ago
The VS Code extensions manager shows a star rating, download count, extension description, a list of the commands they expose, often the popular extensions have animated gifs showing how they work. What else are you looking for? For example when I installed VS Code I needed a Git extension. There are zillions but only two or three that are clearly ahead of the pack and it only took a few minutes to try each one.
- eridius 8y ago
  What I'd really like to see is "date this extension was last updated", and ideally a full changelog. If I see 2 extensions that claim to do the same thing, with similar star ratings, where one isn't being maintained anymore but the other is, there's no way to tell from the extension browser that one of them is still under active development and the other isn't. Download counts are nice but they're also totals, they don't tell me about recent activity, so e.g. if one is an old extension and one is a new extension, the old extension is going to have a higher download count regardless of the relative quality of the two extensions. So "date this extension was last updated" as well as a "recent download count" would go a long way toward making the extension browser easier to use.
  - cheerlessbog 8y ago
    That makes sense. maybe you could suggest it to them, if nobody did already.

kkarakk 8y ago

MS's attitude towards package managers has always confused me. even in vs2019, typing in Microsoft.something sometimes brings up paid extensions as the first result but not always. no way to rate an extension with an explanation in nuget(or vscode) means i'm usually googling "good extension for [x]" instead of using the package manager search

cheerlessbog 8y ago

The VS Code extensions manager shows a star rating, download count, extension description, a list of the commands they expose, often the popular extensions have animated gifs showing how they work. What else are you looking for? For example when I installed VS Code I needed a Git extension. There are zillions but only two or three that are clearly ahead of the pack and it only took a few minutes to try each one.

eridius 8y ago
What I'd really like to see is "date this extension was last updated", and ideally a full changelog. If I see 2 extensions that claim to do the same thing, with similar star ratings, where one isn't being maintained anymore but the other is, there's no way to tell from the extension browser that one of them is still under active development and the other isn't. Download counts are nice but they're also totals, they don't tell me about recent activity, so e.g. if one is an old extension and one is a new extension, the old extension is going to have a higher download count regardless of the relative quality of the two extensions. So "date this extension was last updated" as well as a "recent download count" would go a long way toward making the extension browser easier to use.
- cheerlessbog 8y ago
  That makes sense. maybe you could suggest it to them, if nobody did already.