Visual Studio Code

Extensions

Extensions that I use.

Formatting

• JSDoc Folder. Automatically folds documentation comments. Combined with Prettier and prettier-plugin-drone-jsdoc for elegant handling of symbol summaries.
• space Camel. Adds virtual spaces to camelCase/PascalCase.

Audible editor

I enjoy sound feedback in software. There are extensions that enable this. Some of them seem to be based on the play-sound npm package. play-sound performs poorly on a default Windows setup but adding MPlayer to PATH helps to prevent the media player from opening.

• TypaTone (Keyboard sounds). Based on TypaTone.
  MPlayer has a quirk when playing back sounds shorter than one second when invoked from Node.js. I’m not sure why this happens, but it does æffect playback of sounds from this extension. This cause sounds to loop forever until manually killed. My workaround is to manually edit the extension after installation and pad out æffected sounds.
• Sound Syntax.
• Rainbow Fart.

Accessibility and signals

Visual Studio Code has accessibility features. Signals are one of them. These are enabled when a screen reader is detected. However, there is a way to force them on, providing an audible experience regardless of whether a screen reader is being used.

In a configuration, an enabled set of signals look like this:

{
	"accessibility.signalOptions.volume": 100,
	"accessibility.signalOptions.debouncePositionChanges": false,
  	"accessibility.signals.save": { "sound": "userGesture" },
	"accessibility.signals.format": { "sound": "always" },
	"accessibility.signals.lineHasError": { "sound": "on" },
	"accessibility.signals.lineHasWarning": { "sound": "on" },
	"accessibility.signals.lineHasFoldedArea":  { "sound": "on" },
}

There are way more signals. Type in “accessibility.signals” and let it autocomplete the rest.