Back when I was a Brackets user and an Adobe employee, I used to do a review of interesting and useful extensions. This proved to be a pretty popular series so I thought it might be a good idea to do the same for my current favorite editor, Visual Studio Code. Right now I'm thinking I'll try for two reviews per month, but we'll see if they prove interesting enough for my readers. (So yes, consider this my plea to let me know in comments if this is useful or not.)

For my first review, I'm going to review one built by a good friend of mine, Andy Trice. I feel like I should warn folks before I review things built by my friends, but at the same time, if an extension sucks, I probably won't bother actually reviewing it!

The extension I'm covering today is an extremely simple one, but one that adds a really useful feature - Output Colorizer. This extension does two things: It colorizes output (duh) and .log files.

Like I said - simple. But when you compare a before and after views you'll see it's definitely worth adding to your VSCode install.

As an example, here is Git output without the extension installed:

Bland

Pretty boring, right? Like drinking a Michelob Ultra. Now here is Git output with the extension running:

Exciting!

Much nicer, right? That's like going from a Bud Light to a Stone Ruination Double! It's a small thing, but so darn useful. Anything that outputs down there will be updated, and that includes other extensions that send output there as well. As I said, log files are also updated:

Log files

In case it isn't obvious, the log on top shows the uncolorized output versus what you get with the extension.

So... yeah. Not exactly the most exciting extension, but as I've said a few times now, really darn useful. The extension is currently at over eleven thousand downloads which is pretty freaking amazing. If you want to see all of the above in video form, you can watch it below.