Hardhat VSCode

The Solidity editing experience you’ve been waiting for, coming in 2022

After making great leaps in key aspects of Ethereum’s developer experience, like speed and runtime visibility, we’ve been working on improving another fundamental aspect that we’ve highlighted in the past: Solidity editing assistance.

With some Solidity codebases reaching tens of thousands of lines of code, this has been a significant need for many for a while, and we’re excited to show you a sneak peek of what’s coming soon. We’ve built this in yet another collaboration with our friends at Tenderly.

The Hardhat VSCode extension won’t be the first one to provide Solidity support for VSCode, but when it comes to assisting the writing of code for a typed language, we think being type-smart is where the value lies, and that’s going to be the main differentiator for this upcoming release.

The initial versions are going to be all about the traditional features developers expect in a programming editor, properly implemented for every Solidity version.

The extension will work for any Solidity project, regardless of whether they’re using Hardhat or not, but, in the future, extra magic will happen when used in combination with other Hardhat components.

Once the core feature set is mature we’ll start experimenting with the features we dream of: deep integrations like gas cost analysis next to code, and enabling extension through plugins.

The bigger picture objective is to make the Solidity language server within Hardhat VSCode into its own generic project and get plugins built for the most popular editors. High-quality Solidity editing assistance should and will be ubiquitous.

When Hardhat VSCode launches it will, in combination with Hardhat Ignition, shape Hardhat’s path to keep growing as a fully-featured development environment for Ethereum, with products on multiple key areas of the development process:

• Programming editor — Hardhat VSCode
• Local build/test workflow — Hardhat Runner
• Deployment solution — Hardhat Ignition
• Development network — Hardhat Network

Stay tuned for the release announcement, and start thinking of what amazing integrations could be built across these. We’re excited to hear your thoughts!

• Follow @HardhatHQ on Twitter and Nomic Labs on Medium.
• Join the Hardhat Discord server to get help and participate in the community.