Thomas Britton

Creative frontend developer

Over the last 15 years, I've been lucky to work with some great clients and companies on all kinds of digital projects, from the first idea to the final launch. I love getting stuck into new tech and figuring out creative, practical ways to solve problems. I'm always learning something new. What drives me most is building websites and apps that people actually enjoy using and that make a real difference for businesses.

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My VS Code setup (as of 2026)

As you’ve probably guessed, I use Visual Studio Code for pretty much all of my web development work. This post is a quick walkthrough of how I’ve set up VS Code and the tools I rely on day to day.

Theme

I use the Poimandres theme, opting for the no-italics version. While italics can look nice, I personally find they reduce readability.

Poimandres strikes a great balance between aesthetics and usability and the colours are calm but still distinct, which makes scanning code faster and less fatiguing during long stretches in the editor.

Font

For my editor font, I’m currently using IBM Plex Mono.

It strikes a really nice balance between character clarity and personality. Letterforms are easy to distinguish at smaller sizes, spacing feels comfortable, and it stays readable even during long coding sessions. I’ve found it pairs particularly well with the Poimandres colour palette without feeling too busy or cramped.

Extensions

Now for the extensions I use regularly — and would happily recommend to any frontend developer.

  • Document This - A very handy way to auto generate JSDoc comments from your functions, this saves a lot of time when writing out good inline usage of what it happening in your JS functions. This also works with TypeScript.
  • ESlint - Kind of self explanatory
  • Live Server - Working on some quick? Just prototyping an idea? Don’t want the hassle of setting up and installing lots of dependenices? Then this for you, just right click on the file in the editor and click ‘Open with Live server’ and it’ll load it up in a browser with hot reloading and the rest of what you’d expect.
  • Settings Sync - Do you have multiple computers? Or just want to store your VS Code settings and extensions? Then this is a must.
  • VS Code Styled-Components - If you use styled-components, then this is a must plugin as it gives proper CSS syntax highlighting, syntax errors and intellisense.
  • Web Accessibility- A handy extension that gives you hints on if your HTML could be improved from an accessibility point of view.

I have a lot more extensions installed, too many to list here but if you are interested you can check out all my settings in this gist.