I work almost exclusively these days in Visual Studio Code, for reasons blogged about previously. I also primarily use GitLab for SCM and today I discovered a nifty VSC extension, GitLab Workflow.

To use GitLab Workflow, simply add configuration to your user settings for your GitLab instance URL (if self-hosted) and a GitLab personal access token. This configuration is done automatically when you launch VSC the first time after installing the extension.

Some of the immediate benefits I’m realizing with the extension are:

• ability to create a merge request (MR) for your current working branch,
• ability to quickly inspect a CI pipeline via status bar indicator and then a simple click and select to open the pipeline in your browser
• sidebar navigation for GitLab including issues and MRs

I love working in GitLab and VSC and now, especially with some custom keybindings in VSC, I am able to work even more productively within the VSC editor window without needing to switch over to my browser.