IntelliJ IDEA is pretty amazing for Grails development work. It is rather demanding on resources (particularly memory), though, and takes a long while to start up, so occasionally I like to use Visual Studio Code instead for light editing. I'm trying to tune it most effectively for Grails development. Any tips would be most welcome. One thing I'd particularly like to know is if there is some way of setting up a beautifier/formatter for .gsp files.
First of all, you'll have to setup VS Code for java. You can follow this page https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/java
Then, you'll have to install of the groovy language extension. Currently there are three such extensions in the library. code-groovy has more active users than the others and it provides good gsp support. I do use VS code for quick editing or just viewing source code occasionally but its still not the replacement of Intellij. I can't use VS Code for hardcore java/grails development yet.