Benefits of Customization

[00:00:00]
>> Mike North: So, the next topic we're gonna cover is we're gonna a little bit into work space customization. So, this last set of topics is, this had to do with customizing visual studio code to meet our needs. And then we're gonna just touch on the two elements beyond that tasks and launch configurations.

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So, we've already dealt with tasks, sorry, we've already been working with launch configurations, we're gonna dive a little bit deeper. Alright, let's kill this, cause we don't need it anymore and here we go. All right, so why would we want to customize our work space here? Well, first off, you spend a lot of time in your code editor.

[00:00:43]
This is the same reason developers tend to buy decent headphones, like if you're listening to music all day, you may as well make it a good experience for yourself. You may as well have a nice chair because you're in it all day, and you may as well like, tweak your editor so that, you know, it's not straining your eyes, and so you can really review, if you open up a piece of code, you can see what's going on with greater ease.

[00:01:05]
So what can configuration do for you? It can noticeably increase your speed if you get the right plugins and you get key bindings set up so that you can you don't do things quickly, that's good. Just changing the look and feel can make things easier to read and write.

[00:01:21]
You can spot errors more easily if you add things like static analysis tools and through color schemes you can noticeably reduce fatigue and give your eyes a couple of extra years before you start to have vision problems. Which we're all likely to have a little bit, but we may as well put that off as long as we can.

[00:01:44]
So in terms of levels of customization, you can do this in a couple of different ways. And this is, these are listed from most specific and highest Precedent downward. So you can save some settings right in the project, like this can be part of your stuff that you're checking in to get, and this might be things that pertain to this specific code base.

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You can make that something you share with your whole team, anyone who's using VS code will like, read that file and they'll get whatever's in that file. Then you have user specific settings, and these, depending on which OS you're using, they're available in various places. The easiest way to access them for, on a Mac at least is command comma.

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And you see we've got this nice little like user settings editor here. We will dive in in a moment. There are the defaults that chip with the editor. That is the lowest level, a complete set of preferences. So if you haven't defined anything in your project, or it's a user setting, you will get the default.

[00:02:46]
It's sort of the lowest level, but you fall back to that if you don't find anything else.