The best vscode extensions for the Monkey C developer

Thanks for the list.

I noticed you recommended Rainbow Brackets. Couple of notes:

- I was never able to find any extension like this for Eclipse, although other modern editors (like Sublime Text and Intellij) have an equivalent. This goes back to how newer is sometimes actually better (Sublime Text has been around for 13 years btw)

- Rainbow Brackets hasn't been updated since 2016, whereas Bracket Pair Colorizer 2 has been recently updated

- There's a bunch of bugs/quirks in Rainbow Brackets, like the fact that it colors brackets in commented lines

- Even Bracket Pair Colorizer 2 has known performance issues with large files, even though the author rewrote the extension to improve performance

- I've also noticed that sometimes Bracket Pair Colorizer 2 stops working as VS Code memory usage increases, and a restart is necessary (not sure if Rainbow Brackets would have the same issue)

Anyway, the VS Code team has reimplemented this feature natively, and they claim it's 10,000X faster.

- Open JSON settings:

CTRL/CMD-SHIFT-P, Open Settings (JSON)

- Add the following line:

"editor.bracketPairColorization.enabled": true

flowstate said:

Bracket Pair Colorizer 2

I think I tried that one too but think it did not work with mc files.

flowstate said:

Anyway, the VS Code team has reimplemented this feature natively, and they claim it's 10,000X faster.

Good that it's now available natively, although I think that the barrier for installing an extension is lower than a user having to edit a json file...

peterdedecker said:

Good that it's now available natively, although I think that the barrier for installing an extension is lower than a user having to edit a json file...

Fair enough. The setting is also available in the regular settings interface:

I think if you start using VS Code for complex projects (including non-Monkey C stuff), it would be helpful to use the native feature to avoid performance issues. I've def seen the problem where Bracket Pair Colorizer 2 just stops working, when I have a ton of files open (not sure if it's also related to having multiple VS Code windows open). In this case the only way to fix it is to restart VS Code. I'm hoping this won't happen with the native feature.

peterdedecker said:

FlowState said:

Bracket Pair Colorizer 2

I think I tried that one too but think it did not work with mc files.

That's strange, it works for me.

BTW, Bracket Pair Colorizer 2 is now unmaintained, according to the extension page. And it's the most popular bracket colorizer extension for VS Code, so I feel like eventually the native functionality will take over (seems like the only reason to use a different extension is if it has options/behavior that the native functionality does not.)

updated the article to recommend the native setting option instead.