If You Are Curios Like Me
Every time when I clone a flutter/dart repo to see a specific functionality or to learn something new, I always open pubspec.yaml first just out of curiosity. Pretty often the main attention point of looking at pubspec.yaml is the dependencies section.
If you are like me, you probably have the same habit of copy a dependency name and paste it to browser’s search input or straight to the pub.dev website to see what the package is about, how it is used, and what it offers.
Last week I realized that I can save some time and have some really easy entry point for Vscode extension development. I decided to create a simple extension that will allow me to open pub.dev for a package directly from the Vscode.
Here it is, PubLink.
Some takeaways from this small project:
I’ve never developed a Vscode extension before. It was a very smooth experience. I’ve used yo code to scaffold the project and it was very helpful.
Last time when I touched Typescript was about 5 years ago and, at best, I have a year of TS experience on hands. However, it is amazing how easy it was to get back to it with help of LLMs. I must admit, current level of dev support from tools like Copilot anf ChatGPT when you don’t really know neither the language nor the platform is just mind-blowing.
A bit off-topic, but it reminds me big brands are un umbrella for so many different products and quality of those products can vary a lot. For example, A long time ago I’ve mostly used “Visual Studio for Mac” for Xamarin development which, at the time, was just a renamed MonoDevelop IDE. The experience of working in this IDE was questionable at best. I do remember an attempt to create a simple extension for it and it was a nightmare. On the other hand, “Visual Studio Code” is just a pleasure to work with in terms of use of it and development for it. Similar branding, very different experience.
Publishing an extension to the marketplace is a breeze. Smooth experience, no issues at all.
I’m planing to extend this extension with more features in the future. One of the ideas is to show a popup with a package information like description, version, and so on. It will be a good exercise to work with Vscode API and a http client in Typescript.