I think you call this a stack, where you talk about applications you use and their setup. So, I am gonna write a university stack, or a general productivity stack, but this is my VSCode stack, which in essence is a list of extensions I use and my setup.

  • Colour Theme: Rouge
    • I like navy and the soft pink is really nice. -I also have used Horizon Bright by jolaleye if I ever want to use a light theme (so, not super often, but enough to say I like it as a theme). This isn’t available on VSCode marketplace anymore, but other versions have been made of it.
    • I am trying out Natural by Marco Franzese
    • Name: Paddy Color Theme has a really nice variety of colour themes too, which I use occasionally.
  • Font: Fira Mono
  • File Icon Theme: Field Lights Theme
  • LaTeX:
    • see below
  • Markdown:
  • Hugo:
  • R:
    • see below
  • GitHub:
  • Other
    • I have some Jupyter extensions installed but I don’t really use Jupyter that much. I needed it for one statistics class iirc, but for statistics I prefer to use R separately to VSCode (at most, I will edit code in VSCode).
    • I have Music Time for Spotify installed, but I don’t really use it.
    • I have all the basic Python extensions installed but, again, only needed for one class. I don’t use Python much now, and I am quite bad at it anyway lol.
    • I recently downloaded the Go extension since I need to use it to download hugo-extended, but like, I don’t think I need the extension.
    • Oh, and I use GitHub, but you don’t need extensions for that haha.

Using R in VSCode

WOW I just set up R properly to see if I could break free from RStudio and thank goodness it seems to have worked. Prerequisites to follow the instructions are that you need GitHub, R (and rtools package), and Python (and pip).

  • Following
  • I didn’t know what r.rterm.windows meant lol
    • “The quite mysterious instructions refer simply to the setting in the R extension in Visual Studio Code. To set this value to the R executable path, these are the steps in VS Code 1.35.1 on Windows. File > Preferences > Extensions. Right click on the R extension and Configure Extension Settings. In the R > Rterm: Windows cell, paste the path to the R executable.”1
  • You end up installing
    • R
    • languageserver in R (link)
      • from CRAN (i.e. in the R terminal) with install.packages("languageserver")
    • R for Visual Studio Code
    • radian, a modern R console
      • requires Python and pip
      • change extension settings: "r.bracketedPaste": true and "r.rterm.windows":"C:\\Users\\user\\AppData\\Local\\Programs\\Python\\Python37\\Scripts\\radian.exe"
        • can just search “bracketed paste” and “rterm windows” in settings, or change JSON I think
    • httpgd
      • from CRAN with install.packages("httpgd")
      • change extension settings: enable r.plot.useHttpgd to true
        • can just search “useHttpgd” in settings
    • R Debugger
      • needs vscDebugger
        • I installed with remotes::install_github("ManuelHentschel/vscDebugger")
          • requires GitHub I think but more importantly Rtools which is surprisingly large
  • I could install
    • rmarkdown with install.packages("rmarkdown")
      • I don’t use R markdown tho so

bada bing bada boom R now works on my VSCode. this took too long.

Using LaTeX in VSCode

SETTING UP VISUAL STUDIO CODE FOR LATEX by Peter W. Smith shows how to set up LaTeX with a linguistics focus, which is coincidentally convenient for me: https://pwsmith.github.io/2020/06/05/setting-up-a-text-editor-for-latex-vscode/. Another setup, How to set up VS Code for LaTeX by Marlene Mayr: https://marlenemayr.github.io/blog/latex-in-vscode.

Other things

Set tab size per file type. Markdown causing me pain with it’s tab size of 2… but it’s fixed now. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34247939/how-to-set-per-filetype-tab-size

On that note, this is a more comprehensive stack post about tab size, indents as spaces and inherit https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36814642/visual-studio-code-convert-spaces-to-tabs#:~:text=There%20are%203%20options%20in.vscode%2Fsettings.json%3A%20%2F%2F%20The%20number,detected%20based%20on%20the%20file%20contents.%20%22editor.detectIndentation%22%3A%20true

Snippets: for dashes, https://fotoallerlei.com/blog/post/2020/typing-en-and-em-dashes-in-vs-code/post/

  1. https://superuser.com/questions/1455225/how-to-install-r-extension-in-visual-studio-code#:~:text=File%20%3E%20Preferences%20%3E%20Extensions%20Right%20click%20on,cell%2C%20paste%20the%20path%20to%20the%20R%20executable ↩︎