Matthias Ott’s posted his VS Code setup. I find lists like this (I rounded up some recent updates of my own) irresistible, probably because, like y’all, I spend an awful lot of time in VS Code and wanna make sure I’m getting the most out of it.
Things from the list that stood out to me:
- I didn’t realize Bracket Pair Colorizer had gone v2 and it’s a separate install.
- I didn’t realize you needed an extension to honor
.editorconfig
files. Update: you don’t. - I wasn’t using anything for PHP, but Matthias listed PHP Intelephense and I’m giving it a whirl. It has fewer users than the non-weirdly named one though? And when I installed that, I saw Format HTML in PHP which I’m also trying because, yes, please! (Even Prettier’s PHP add-on can’t do that.)
Messing with extensions is also a good opportunity to clear out old crap.
Also super interesting…
The main point of that series is cleaning up the interface of VS Code in extreme ways. All the way down to:

Format HTML in PHP looks cool, thanks!
“UPDATE: This extension [EditorConfig] is obviously no longer needed as VS Code now comes with support for .editorconfig files built-in.”
That’s great, Chris. You know I love improving my workflows a lot. Most of my open-source tools are for helping developers automate to be more productive.
I’ve spent a loooot of time building the VSCode.pro course where I shared my own workflows for both PHP and JavaScript.
Actually, one of the best parts is macros workflow; the one where I was able to pull off PHP autoformatting on save just like you have with prettier.
I’d love for you to check it out when you have some time. Would also love to share any workflow you like there, here on CSS-Tricks in a blog post. I’ve got a couple hundreds of these. Most devs found em helpful.
Peace.