Visual Studio Code is a programmer’s text editor written by Microsoft. It is a lightweight but powerful source code editor which runs on your desktop and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It comes with built-in support for JavaScript, TypeScript and Node.js and has a rich ecosystem of extensions for other languages (such as C++, C#, Python, PHP) and runtimes. It works on Mac, Linux and Windows.

You code with IntelliSense which has completions for variables, methods, and imported modules. It has streamlined debugging, it has linting, multi-cursor editing, parameter hints, and other powerful editing features. You can browse your source code quickly using peek and navigate to definition. Also you can speed up your release cycle with Git support inside your editor.

You can customize the editor in three ways: Tools and Languages, secondly Keyboard Shortcuts and thirdly Colour Themes.

Atom is another good option.

Extensions

Auto Close Tag and Auto Rename Tag are two useful extensions, both written by Jun Han.

Getting Started

Microsoft has a Getting Started web page with useful information including links to instructional videos.

Getting started with VS code, or anything else can be a slow process. Have a look at code.makery’s page called Part 1 Your First Website. They start at the beginning. Perhaps you are leaning HTML or CSS or Bootstrap. Using Visual Studio Code would be a good choice. You can start with a simple HTML page and go from there. As the website says you will need to install VS Code (free) and then install Live Server.

YouTube Videos

Here is a good video by LearnWebCode at YouTube called Visual Studio Code: HTML, CSS & JS Tips. He starts the video with some tips on how to save yourself time when typing HTML and CSS code with the help of Emmet. Emmet (formerly Zen Coding) is a set of plug-ins for text editors that allow for high-speed coding and editing in HTML, XML, XSL, and other structured code formats via content assist.

Here is another YouTube video on VS Code called Visual Studio Code Tutorial for Beginners – Introduction.