Visual Studio Code has thousands of extensions that add productivity-boosting features, support for more languages, and integrations with other development tools. My favorite extension doesn’t do any of those things, though: it connects to Discord.
The Discord chat application has a ‘Presence’ feature, which shows someone’s current activity on their profile. It was primarily built to show a person’s current game activity, across platforms like Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox. However, it can also display your Spotify activity if you connect your account, and other services can use it withDiscord’s Rich Presence API. It’s a fun way to see what your friends are doing, and other people can see what you’re doing.
Visual Studio Code doesn’t have built-in support for Discord Presence, but the third-partyDiscord Presence extensioncan fix that.
VS Code, Meet Discord
The Discord Presence extension adds an activity indicator to your Discord profile, including the Visual Studio Code application name, the name of the workspace you have open, and name of the file you have open. I’ve noticed that last item doesn’t always work if you have multiple files open in different panes, but I haven’t had any other issues. The image in the activity is based on the current file—curly brackets for a JSON file, a Terminal icon for a bash script, the Dart logo for a Dart file, and so on.
The extension doesn’t require your Discord credentials or anything else. It just sends data to the Discord application installed on your computer, in the same way as every other application or game that uses the Rich Presence API. As soon as you install it, it communicates with your Discord client.
There are some additional settings options you’re able to try out: click the Extensions tab in your sidebar, click the settings button on Discord Presence (or right-click it), and select Settings. You can set the message strings for editing files or debugging, using the current file name, directory, workspace, line, column, repository, branch, and other information as variables.
I like the default settings, but editing messages like “Reading {current_line} of {total_lines}” can be fun, too. You could also just use hardcoded values to mess with whoever sees your profile.
This extension isn’t a boost to my productivity or a meaningful improvement to my coding experience, but it is a fun way to connect my main IDE to the social platform I use the most. If you use Discord and Visual Studio Code, it’s worth checking out.
Try it Out
This is a fun extension if you’re a heavy Discord user, as long as you don’t accidentally reveal secret software projects. Most of my Visual Studio Code usage is withmy open-source software projects, so that’s not an issue for me. you may also change the settings to show more vague information, like the number of lines, the file size, or just the name Visual Studio Code.
You candownload the Discord Presence extensionfrom the Visual Studio Code Marketplace. Keep in mind there arepotential security risks with installing VS Code extensions—I’m not aware of any suspicious behavior with this extension specifically, but it could theoretically be updated in the future with malicious code.
I don’t have many extensions installed in general. I mostly work on web development, and support for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript syntax in VS Code is already solid. I do like theLive Preview extension from Microsoftfor testing pages in web browsers, though.
