VSCode Tips, Tricks and Clicks: Self Documentation

One of the hardest things of coding is knowing what the f*©k you're reading. And given the fact that we read orders of magnitude more code than we write, this should be easier. Hovering on VSCode helps with this.

When I'm confused, i have to use the mouse:

Hover-panel

This shows on VSCode a ton of information, such as the function signature and all the params it needs.

But where does this information come from?

Well, it's not autogenerated, yet.

I went to function that generated the hover and voilá, it said:

Hover-function-signature

It's the same information, as comments. Underneath, it uses JSDoc

JSDoc-autocomplete

You even get autocomplete and syntax highlighting when documenting yourself!

JSDoc-syntax-highlighting

One thing to bear in mind is that this works out of the box for JavaScript and TypeScript, but extensions are available for other languages.