I want to share my dev set up.
VS Code is my code editor of choice. ( Microsoft can make pretty good software if they want to. ) It has an incredible eco system of plugins for most likely everything you need. Iโll get to the plug-ins in a second.
VS Code
VS code out of the box comes with built in terminal, git integration and an easy settings system that you can adjust with a json file individually for each project.
Projects are organized by folders easy peasy, or you combine them in to workspaces to make it a bit harder to keep track, your choice.
PLUG-IN UNIVERSE
There is a plug-in for everything, well almost everything (Can’t connect it to my Coffee machine, yet ).
I usually work with WordPress so plugins for PHP, WP auto complete are installed. Also some popular WP plugins (Woo, ACF) have their auto complete plugins.
Of course every other programming language is supported with syntax highlighting and auto complete, either out of the box or via plugin.
I used the liquid plugin for Shopify development and it was as easy as expected.
There is a gazillion plugins for code formatting, linting etc. A Plugin to preview Markdown for readme files. Plugins to help with documentation etc. There are a lot of plugins you get the idea.
Then there are some more fancy things in VS Code like Live Share that lets other people work on your code. It is exceptionally easy and reliable.
AFTER I HIT SAVE
That where the fun starts. I’m lazy efficient, so we need to automate things.
Gulp is a task runner, when I save (or move the window focus to another program, which triggers an autosave) a scss is converted to css and injected via live local server so I see the change without constant reloading. Saving of PHP files triggers a page reload.
VS Code is also not done after save. It can execute commands after your save in in my case it throws the php file to PHP Code Beautifier and formats it according to WP coding standards or yells at me if I made a mistake.
It took some time to get to this set up and the VS Code power user helped a lot. He has the same birthday as I do and ran a special once so I bought it :-).