Visual Studio Code has become somewhat of a standard code editor, and that’s all and well. Much of its success builds on extensions to make your coding experience (if there is such a thing) more convenient, faster, better, less error-prone, you name it.

But sometimes these extensions get in the way of producing beautiful, readable and in some cases compliant code, because eg. coding conventions are not always decided by you. And much less they are decided by your chosen editor or IDE.

So here I intend to list all the extensions that had to be beaten into submission or outright banned, because they made my code uglier, changed it in non-compliant ways (sometimes introducing bugs, which is a strict no-no) or did any other stupid stuff to it.

I try to hold the list alphabetically, and will introduce an index if this article gets into TL;DR territory. Promise!

So, let’s start:

Autoimporter(?)

Whatever, that thing that tries to be smart about the python code you write and determine which modules have to be imported. Which is not something a program should decide, especially if it gets it wrong all the time, like this autoimporter thing.

Have to find its name to really put the blame where it belongs, so as long as I don’t have lowered my blood pressure enough to go on a search for something I never want to use again, this part is WIP.

Prettier

Yes, yes, people write ugly code. Does that mean you are allowed to change my C code from my preferred style, which for starters uses classic K&R indentation (according to this wikipedia article) to something like Allen indentation. I don’t like it, it uses too much vertical space, and if I ever forget a curly brace the compiler will be nice enough to tell me, and I will have no problem finding out that I missed a curly brace, thankyouverymuch.

So Prettier is one of the extensions I have banned from my Virtual Studio Code.

Apart from this, there’s Clang-Format, which is apparently preinstalled on some distributions, I don’t know. It’s not installed on mine (and also banned, same reason).