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# Learn With Me: Elixir - Visual Studio Code and Elixir (#70)
- URL: https://inquisitivedeveloper.com/lwm-elixir-70/
- Published: 2020-03-15T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2020-03-15T15:00:00.000Z
- Description: I talk about the editor and extensions I've been using for writing Elixir code
- Author: Kevin Peter
- Tags: Learn With Me: Elixir, Elixir, #Import 2026-10-23 20:03

Some people love their tools and spend many hours learning and configuring their tools. I am not one of those people. I tend to pick something that's good enough, pick up just enough to start using it, and then gradually learn more about it over time as I use it.

When I first started learning Elixir, I didn't have any particular tool that I used. I mainly just used a simple text editor on whatever computer I happened to be using. When I started working with projects and multiple files, however, I decided that I wanted something better. I ended up trying Visual Studio Code because it was free, simple, cross-platform, and had a good plugin ecosystem. I've been writing these posts while using my Windows, MacOS, and Linux machines, so I definitely wanted something that would work on all those platforms.

I had heard some good things about Visual Studio Code from people who don't normally use Microsoft software, but I was a bit reluctant to use it. I use Visual Studio on a regular basis for C# development at work, and I found that it was great at handling Microsoft-oriented development technologies, but wasn't that great at other things. I expected Visual Studio Code to be very similar.

I found that this was not the case. Visual Studio Code is quite good for a broad range of uses. It's easy to use, the start-up time is pretty good (especially for an application built as a self-contained web application using Electron), and it has great plugin support for Elixir. Since it is an Electron app, it's fairly large (about 200MB), but I guess that's the price we pay for an easily-maintained cross-platform application. It has a lot of features, but those features are pretty good at staying out of the way, allowing me to start off with the basics.

I wanted to share what I've been using for anyone who's interested.

Visual Studio Code isn't aware of Elixir by default, but it does have a lot of extensions. I'm currently using the [ElixirLS Fork](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=elixir-lsp.elixir-ls&ref=inquisitivedeveloper.com) extension. It is based on the [ElixirLS](https://github.com/JakeBecker/vscode-elixir-ls?ref=inquisitivedeveloper.com) extension, but was forked from ElixirLS when ElixirLS stopped being actively maintained. I've found that ElixirLS Fork is significantly better than the other Elixir extensions I tried for Visual Studio Code.

When I started looking at extensions, I was mainly hoping for Elixir-specific code keyword coloring and maybe a little autocomplete functionality, but it provides so much more. I get recognition of Elixir code syntax, a nice autocomplete functionality, and it appears to run some kind of compilation/analysis tool in the background every time I save the code, providing errors and warnings with the corresponding code highlighted. It can also show me documentation it pulls from Elixir code when I do things like hover the mouse cursor over a function.

Visual Studio Code integrates with git and will also give me a command line window so that I don't have to leave the tool in order to do things like running mix tasks.

I feel like I've barely scraped the surface of what Visual Studio Code can do, and that's probably just fine. I was able to become productive with very little setup time and I'm pretty happy so far.

So if you're looking for a good Elixir development editor, I can recommend Visual Studio Code with the ElixirLS Fork extension.