I give a lot of presentations.
I make a lot of videos, specifically using Visual Studio and Visual Studio
Code, and today I want to show you my top three extensions for VS.
Codes, specifically for giving better presentations and making better
videos, enabling you to really.
Focus in on your code or give additional context when you're making videos so
your users are aware these things are free and some are even built into vs
code that you may not even know existed.
So tune in as I break down these three awesome extensions.
Hey everyone.
I'm James and I'm back with another video this time talking about VS.
Code.
Yeah, I'm always building mobile applications with Dot m, Maui and VS 2022,
but today I wanna talk about VS code and my top three extensions that are for VS
code that I found that I love when I'm doing presentations, whether I'm making
videos or whether I'm out at conferences.
These really.
Focus in on my code and customize my environment.
So what I wanna do is break down why I want to use them, why I think
you think they're helpful, and of course how to get 'em set up.
So let's take a.
All right, I'm here over in VS code, and here I have just a bunch of code files.
I have a PowerShell script, everything's up and running.
And you know, when I'm actually presenting like this, uh, there's a
lot of things on the screen, right?
You have all this explorers on the left hand side.
You have all the different files open.
You have these browsers open, you have all this stuff open.
There's a lot going on.
You know, sometimes you're kind of zooming in, zooming out.
How do you increase the font size, do all these different things, and that's
where, you know, different modes and different extensions can come in.
Now, the first one I want to talk about is one built into VS.
Coat itself.
This one specifically gives additional contacts and different
tips and tricks, specifically like hints when you're actually
doing coding, which is very nifty.
Now, if I go into the control pallet, Um, I can turn on this
thing called screencasting.
You can see I used it recently.
So there's screencast mode, and when I toggle this on, a few things happen.
Now I am in, uh, big, big mode basically for my mouse, but you can see I get this
little red, uh, um, little, uh, little circle going on of exactly where I'm
clicking on the screen, which is very.
Now additionally, as I'm typing, you can see exactly what I'm typing.
That's, that's really interesting.
Like when you're doing live coding, you don't actually get to see everything
that they're coding or that they're typing or too fast, especially when
you're doing, you know, um, your control shift p for example, to bring that up.
You may not know that that's what you need to do because there's typing on their
keyboard, but as I type here, you can see exactly what I am typing inside of.
So I could say, uh, LA for example, and that would come up there.
So you can see the exact keystrokes that I'm doing or if I want
to go and delete everything.
Now you see a backspace, and this is fully customizable.
If I go into my settings over here, I can type in screen cast.
That's gonna pull it up right here.
You control the font size, um, the overlay, timeout, uh, the
mouse color, the mouse size.
So if I wanted that to be 50, for example, um, that would control
that in pixels on the screen.
So you can see it's nice and big, uh, which is cool with my
big mouse, uh, on there too.
And there's a bunch of other modes on here that you can turn
on, which is really, really nice.
So that's one that's built.
Automatically into VS.
Code that screen cast mode.
But what if you are doing coding and you wanna focus in on the code
and you really want to dial it in?
There's where extensions come in.
Uh, if I head over to the extensions and I type presentation or two extensions
that I love, one called presentation mode and another one called Presentation mode,
and there's a bunch of ones in here.
I haven't explored too many of them, but I really like these.
This one here, presentation mode by one is really, really cool.
Let me just go ahead and.
Now when I run this command from the command pallet, what it does
is it really helps me zoom in directly into my presentation.
Now, there are some additional settings here, which is really nice, but I'm
just gonna use the defaults here.
So let's go back over to this PowerShell script and let me open another file here.
Here we go.
We got these two files.
Now all I'm gonna do is go into my command pallet and hit in presentation mode.
There it is, and just like.
Everything about VS.
Code falls into the backdrop and it focuses in directly on my code.
I can tell I go through my code files.
I have my search window here so I can still run commands and do a bunch of
stuff and even run the command pallet if I need to, to tablet on and off.
And again, if I do that again, type in presentation mode, I
can just simply hit escape.
And exit out of it.
Super duper simple.
Let me say that one more time because I just love presentation mode.
Focus in on the code, popping around, doing everything that I want there.
And of course I could bring up terminal, I could map different
things inside of here and I can make this bigger if I wanted to as well.
So I could make that a little bit bigger on the screen.
So presentation mode, a nice little one to focus in on the code,
especially you're working on just a single file or multiple, a few files.
It really helps you dial that in, uh, to really give it, I dunno, it's so cool.
Just boom.
And you're, and you're good to.
Now what if you want a full tailored environment for presentations?
Well, that's where the other presentation mode comes in.
This is coming from uh, CS 50.
And let me go ahead and install that.
So we can see here that there is a keyboard shortcut to turn
this on, and also workspace settings as well, which is nice.
So here we can actually.
Turn on and off.
Different settings.
All right here.
Now this is really highly customizable.
It enables you to turn on match brackets, minim map, scroll
bars, activity workspaces, color themes and customizations for
those color themes as well.
And the window zoom.
So I can get to that as I'm gonna go in and say, open user settings, j json.
And for me, at least when I did this, this was what I saw.
Presentation mode, active.
I just simply copied in those settings and then I could customize.
Okay.
So that's how I got to them.
Um, and once you had them in there, um, you know, you'd have to edit that.
J s o they don't show up, it doesn't seem like in the extensions, but, you know, you
can go in and, like I said, control shift.
P open user settings, j s o, and boom, you can customize these a hundred percent.
So there's a bunch of settings inside of here, and let's see what it does.
If I go back into my PowerShell script and another code file
here, I'm gonna say control shift.
Control Alt P.
There we go.
And now I'm in presentation mode that's customized to my likings.
So here, for example, I can see it went into GitHub dark mode.
Uh, it went ahead and got rid of all of the sort of things on the left hand
side and enabling me to focus in on my control code if I go control Alt P.
I was gonna go ahead and put it back.
And of course, like I said, I can customize this.
So if I go back over to my J S O, say, I really want bigger code, right?
I really want that to be really, really big and I really want the
default to be light, for example.
So lemme just do light here.
Now when I go in and say, control P, we're gonna see, now it's even bigger
code in this GitHub light theme.
By default, if I go ahead, get out of it again, just like that,
I'm good to go and I can of course customize that exactly how I want.
So this to me is really, really powerful, enabling me.
Automatically customize a full presentation mode.
This one's probably one of my favorite extensions.
I do like that the other presentation mode zooms in for me, but again,
this one really allows me to customize exactly what I want.
Let me see it one more time.
Just like that into that mode.
Zooming in the code, everything that you want.
All right.
Those are my three favorite things in VS.
Code and extensions that enable me to make better presentations and
better videos when I'm using VS.
Code to do demos.
What are your favorite extensions?
Are there other things built into VS code that people should know about?
Let me know in the comments below because the great part about VS and VS code is
that there's tons of extensions out there where you can do awesome things like.
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Well, it's gonna do it for this video.
I'd love to hear it back from you.
So again, leave comments below.
But until next time, I'm James.
Thanks for watching.