Technical writers may find the following Visual Studio(VS) Code extensions useful.
You can do all Git-related commands within the VS Code terminal. VS Code comes with a tool to resolve Git merge conflicts, which means you do not need a separate extension for handling Git merge conflicts. I find the following extensions useful.
Git Graph: Visual and easy to use. I use it for cherry-picking so I do not need to use git log to see the checksum.
GitLens: This is super powerful and popular.
For more Git related extensions, see The best VS Code extensions to supercharge Git.
PlantUML: Create and preview UML diagrams in VS Code.
Draw.io: Draw and preview draw.io style diagrams.
Mermaid Preview: Mermaid diagram preview in VS Code.
Vale: Vale is an excellent style and grammar linter. For installation configuration steps, see my post Install and Configure the Vale CLI to work with Visual Studio Code.
Code Spell Checker: This tool is helpful for catching spelling errors in code blocks. Vale ignores code blocks as far as I know.
Readability check: To display the readability score of text in plain text or Markdown files.
Prettier: Code formatter.
VSCode-Pandoc: To render PDF, Word, or HTML in VS Code. You still need to install Pandoc separately as the prerequisite.
Swagger Viewer: For preview Swagger and OpenAPI YML files in VS Code.
Thunder client: Lightweight REST API client in VS Code.
Word Count: For counting the number of words in your file.
Office Viewer: To view Microsoft Word, Excel etc in VS Code.
Caveat: Do not install too many extensions. Having too many extensions might slow down the performance of your VS Code.
