Is your team as productive as can be? We tend to be most productive while using tools we know and like best; that’s why in the majority of dev teams, you’re free to code with your weapon of choice (aka IDE). So no matter if you’re utterly loyal to VS Code or you’re a die-hard-JetBrains fan: these 5 cross-IDE tools are definitely worth checking out!

GitLive

(for VS Code and JetBrains.)

Assuming your team uses Git, then GitLive is a no-brainer enhancement of your IDE’s built-in Git functionality. Once installed, it adds a team view showing all work in progress for each collaborator from your Git repository. Any non-stale branch ahead of master/main is considered a work in progress, and you can inspect diffs of the files changed and view the associated issue or pull request.

But my favorite feature is probably the automatic merge conflict detection. The difference between your local changes and the work in progress of your teammates is shown for your currently open file in the gutter of your editor. It shows you the type of change (addition, deletion, modification, or conflict), and you can inspect it to see the diff, what branch it’s from, and even cherry-pick it into your local file.

Productivity Boost

GitLive can be very useful for larger teams and especially useful for open or inner source projects as these features even work across forks. What’s also cool is as the data comes straight from Git, there’s no manual entry required to keep it up-to-date.

Tabnine

(for VS Code and JetBrains.)

Thinking of ways to speed up your coding? Tabnine might be exactly what you’re looking for. It’s an AI code completion tool that indexes your code and finds statistical patterns to create customized suggestions based on how you write your own code. It allows you to code faster with fewer syntax errors and more code snippets to look into right in your IDE. It gets better with time as it gains more material to analyze, whether you work solo or in a team.

The plugin supports most popular languages, libraries, and frameworks, including Python, Javascript, Java, React, Vue, Rust Typescript, PHP, Angular, C / C++/ C#, and Kotlin.

Tabnine comes in a pro version for bigger teams that uses an advanced AI model and a basic version based on a smaller AI model. Both versions also support Team Trained AI (trained and run locally).

Productivity Boost

Tabnine Teams is trained on your team’s projects, preferences, and patterns. Every interaction improves AI accuracy, bringing its value to the whole team!

Stepsize

(for VS Code and JetBrains.)

Maintaining the health of your codebase requires effort from the whole team, and Stepsize is an example of a tool that can save you time spent on tracking and addressing potential problems. It’s an issue tracker inside your editor for managing technical debt and maintenance issues. Sometimes while coding, we encounter issues that need fixing but don’t have time to do it straight away. Thanks to this handy plugin, you can bookmark code and create TODOs straight in your IDE without affecting your workflow! 

Productivity Boost

The plugin makes it easy to collaborate with your teammates on maintenance and refactoring work.

EditorConfig

(for VS Code or JetBrains.)

EditorConfig is a great help when it comes to maintaining consistent coding styles for multiple developers working on the same project across various editors and IDEs. The EditorConfig project consists of a file format for defining coding styles and a collection of text editor plugins that enable editors to read the file format and adhere to defined styles.

Unlike the most built-in language-specific formatters, EditorConfig’s settings apply to all kinds of files, clearing git diff of trailing whitespace, newlines, or indentation characters.

Productivity Boost

The extension automatically sets the correct IDE settings for each project you switch into, so every developer working on the project will write code in the same style.

Better Comments

(for VS Code and JetBrains.)

The plugin is an example of how a very simple idea can improve the quality of our work. It’s an effective and customizable extension that takes care of creating “human-friendly” (more readable and organized) comments in your code.

You can categorize your annotations into Alerts, Queries, TODOs, and Highlights.

It comes with default comment styles, but any other comment styles can be specified in the settings.

Productivity Boost

Immediately spot important TODOs in your code, so nothing gets overlooked!

Conclusion

I hope some of the awesome plugins I rounded up in this post will make your team collaboration faster, more efficient, and productive. Happy hacking!