P42 JS Assistant

As a JavaScript developer, you know how challenging it can be to work with existing codebases. Often, the code is poorly documented, making it difficult to understand what it does and how it works. That's why I've added two new AI-powered features to the JS Assistant for Visual Studio Code: AI-generated JS-Doc comments and AI-generated explanations for code snippets.

Visual Studio Code provides a solid editing experience and offers many extensions you can install to take it to the next level. These six Visual Studio Code extensions help me stay in the flow and be productive when editing JavaScript and TypeScript code.

The touch bar on the MacBook has the potential to provide quick access to commonly used commands in Visual Studio Code.

In the default configuration, the 'go forward' and 'go back' buttons are very useful. However, other default touch bar actions are less valuable and take up space. You might also find that everyday operations such as 'rename' (F2) or 'go to definition' (F12) are harder to access because you need to hold down Fn.

This post will show you how to configure Visual Studio Code to make the most of the touch bar.

About one year after the 1.0 release of the Refactoring Assistant, it has been installed over 10,000 times. Here are some growth stats:

0 => 100 installations: 1 month
100 => 1,000 installations: 4 months
1,000 => 10,000 installations: 10 months

The current version v1.147 offers 89 free and 24 premium code assists, compared to 16 code assists in v1.0.

You get all P42 code assists and refactoring suggestions inside<script> and <script setup> sections. TypeScript is supported inside <script lang="ts"> or <script setup lang="ts"> sections.

Does not require any other extension. Compatible with Vetur and Volar. Works in Visual Studio Code, on vscode.dev, and on github.dev.

Since February, the P42 JavaScript Assistant for Visual Studio Code has grown considerably and contains over 90 code assists and refactorings. The user interface has been improved based on feedback, and the JavaScript Assistant now supports Vue.js. Here are the details:

https://p42.ai/blog/2022-06-20/whats-new-in-p42-summer-2022-summary

JavaScript programming in an editor such as Visual Studio Code typically involves a lot of manual text editing, with the occasional copy-paste keyboard shortcuts or multi-cursor changes.

Code assists such as refactorings, code actions, and quick fixes are another tool in this repertoire. You can use code assists to make higher-level language-aware changes, e.g., you can extract an expression and all of its occurrences into a variable. When you make such changes manually, it can be time-consuming, and you risk making mistakes.

The JavaScript Assistant now contains 85 refactorings from many different categories. Check out the blog post for an overview:

"@p42ai makes refactoring a ton of fun ❤️"
-- Twitter

"My favorite VS code tool 👍"
-- Twitter

"One of the most useful tools in my VS Code arsenal.
Cleaning up old code takes a fraction of the time I spend before."
-- Twitter

"A few years ago I've switched from PHP Storm to X editor and then to @code. I really missed all those powerful refactoring commands PHP Storm had. @p42ai is slowly fulfilling that gap. Give it a try, it's awesome!"
-- Twitter

"Woah vscode is turning into an IDE. Amazing work"
-- Reddit

"Stopping by to echo great work! You have me seriously considering trying VS Code again with this one :)"
-- Reddit

"The code-suggestions have been really useful."
-- User Feedback

"P42 JavaScript Assistant is helping me a lot in my coding level. It helped me to learn to write simplified and modern code. I also referred P42 JavaScript Assistant to my colleagues as well. Thank you for the extension, it has changed the way used to write the code before."
-- User Feedback

"It has been very useful for my coding in nodejs."
-- User Feedback

In JavaScript code, especially in older legacy code, you sometimes find the expression void 0. The void operator evaluates an expression and returns the primitive value undefined. void 0 evaluates 0, which does nothing, and then returns undefined. It is effectively an alias for undefined.

The optional chaining operator .? returns the value of an object property when the object is available and undefined otherwise. It lets you write concise and safe chains of connected objects when some of those objects can be null or undefined.

However, there are some cases where refactoring into optional chaining can lead to bugs: