A great feature that ships with VSCode is the “tasks” capability. I’ve not seen many developers use it, so I thought I’d document how it’s made my life blogging with a statically-generated site simpler.

Often, when doing any development, developers find themselves performing certain loops: drop to shell, run some command, capture output, paste output back into the editor, etc. Eventually most developers wind up curating a per-project set of shell aliases and functions to accelerate that loop. Perhaps the high-water mark for this behavior is the Rails framework which came with a task runner, rake, by default.

I’m glad to say that VSCode has a built-in task runner facility that can be leveraged to make whole series of routine tasks much more pleasant.