Visual Studio Code 1.9

https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_9

by jrwiegand • 9 years ago

451 273 9 years ago

code.visualstudio.com

billconan• 9 years ago

I hope it could support gdb remote debugging

jhasse2• 9 years ago

have you tried https://github.com/WebFreak001/code-debug#using-gdbserver-fo... ?

pwthornton3• 9 years ago

I have a new project at work that I decided to use it for to see how I liked using VS Code.

For the most part, I like it, but it's lack of Mac-nativeness bugs me, and it may bug me enough to switch. Double clicking the window bar in all natives app minimizes them to the dock for me. In Visual Studio, it maximizes my window (but not into full screen mode). I keep clicking the menu bar to minimize a window, and this keeps happening. It's kind of maddening.

testUser692• 9 years ago

It looks pretty bad on Linux too. Somehow they managed to transport the crappy font rendering from Windows to Linux. It really feels like it's not built for Linux, but just shoe-horned in.

k__3• 9 years ago

I'm using it on Windows and Linux, and found it pretty good. What's the issue with fonts?

bsznjyewgd• 9 years ago

On Linux, it renders fonts the same way Chromium or Chrome do. If you're getting "crappy font rendering from Windows", you probably need to change your fonts.conf to change font hinting from full to slight (or none, if you like it more like Macs).

Edit: And also note that, for whatever reason, GNOME does its own thing where you also have to edit the GSettings in addition to the fonts.conf settings depending on what app you're running.

WorldMaker8• 9 years ago

Font rendering is handled by Chromium's libraries/dependencies.

Do you also criticize Chromium's font rendering? Maybe you are just looking for things to complain about?

crazysim• 9 years ago

There is a way to set VScode to use the native menu bar on macOS instead of the Electron'd frameless bar.

acdha• 9 years ago

Enabling that system-wide made the experience so much more pleasant:

    "window.titleBarStyle": "native",

hasenj• 9 years ago

I never minimize anything on Mac, the concept is not so useful since there's nothing interesting on the "desktop" anyway.

pwthornton3• 9 years ago

I keep a lot of different overlapping windows open, and I sometimes minimize apps to find other stuff, not the desktop. For instance, I might be minimizing my text editor so that I can push a bunch of Git changes in Tower.

leeoniya• 9 years ago

still no portable mode? :(

alyandon• 9 years ago

While it won't make VSCode portable would something like the Settings Sync plugin help?

0xcoffee• 9 years ago

You could try via command args:

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/329#issuecomment-...

Keyframe• 9 years ago

Anyone knows if there's something like Goya for Vim for VSCode? I know there's full screen and zen modes, but I miss margins so that when I'm full screen I can have everything centred on monitor.

santaclaus3• 9 years ago

VS Code's release notes are really nicely done - I don't usually comment on documentation but whoever wrote these did a bang up job!

LyalinDotCom• 9 years ago

yeah I must say the team does a great job, I was thinking the same thing

Cthulhu_2• 9 years ago

I remarked this to my colleagues; part of me wishes they'd do faster releases, if only so that the changelog is smaller. Big lists of changes scare me. Big lists of changes that were apparently all done in a month and work without being horribly broken or half-assed, on the other hand, impress me.

This comment is a long-winded compliment.

Matthias247• 9 years ago

Absolutely! I love to read through them on each release to discover whats new. And each time I'm surprised how many new useful things get integrated.

mootothemax• 9 years ago

Anyone know if the C# plugin supports cshtml files yet? The lack of autocomplete, inspections and so on really hampers web development with it.

I've now switched entirely to using Rider because of this. While it's still early days for Rider (and it makes my Laptop's fans spin nonstop), being able to hastily edit my views makes it more than worth it.

(And integrated ReSharper is always good!)

rk06• 9 years ago

If you are using C#, why not use Visual Studio?

reynoldsbd2• 9 years ago

Another great release!

Maybe I'm just squarely within the target audience of VSCode, but I'm consistently impressed by how many of my pain points just magically go away with each new iteration.

k__3• 9 years ago

I come from WebStorm, Sublime and Atom.

Atom and WebStorm felt rather clunky. Sublime was super fast, but somehow lacked behind in new features.

VSCode is a revelation for me :)

restlessmedia• 9 years ago

I had to move off WebStorm after the sheer amount of memory it used to chew up.

Agree - VSCode is such a good IDE, I'm constantly seeing it replace editors other devs have relied on for some time.

tonyedgecombe3• 9 years ago

I miss the test runners from WebStorm, that hasn't been enough to stop me from switching to VSCode though.

anaganisk• 9 years ago

whenever I try Webstorm, my laptop starts sounding like an Airbus A380. What makes VSCode different from Atom though is, VScode uses Monaco which is significantly better and also the start up is faster with VSCode.

specialist• 9 years ago

How are other people doing ES6 work with WebStorm?

---

I am a very happy Jetbrains customer (ultimate, paid in full).

Now doing nodejs work. (Not a fan, it's just a job.) Really want to use latest, greatest (eg await/async). I tried to make the babel plugin workflow thingie work. Bleh.

I'll give VSCode another shot. Last effort, I stumbled on the npm package.json support. The npm plugins I tried baffled me. (Again, not a fan of npm, it's just a job.)

rdslw• 9 years ago

Their Workbench related changes in this release are great. Pay attention to redone (also faster!!) terminal support.

https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_9#_workbench

yokohummer78• 9 years ago

The slowness shown in the pre-1.9 terminal is a bit ridiculous. Was it really the case? I've never seen such a strangely-behaving emulator! Really good that they resolved the issue.

Tyriar3• 9 years ago

Hi, I worked on those improvements. Yes that is indeed what would happen when you ran a command with heaps of output, it would also lock up the UI while doing it. You probably haven't observed it much as you don't do recursive directory walk on a large directory ;)

You can read more about the specifics if you're interested in https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/17875

AsyncAwait9• 9 years ago

Hey, just wanted to say thanks for working on VS Code, I use it every day, love it!

yokohummer78• 9 years ago

Great, I didn't know the terminal portion if VS Code exists as a separate project. Was it made to fuel VS Code? Or did it already exist before launching VS Code?

I also liked the name of the project, xterm.js. :)

masterwok• 9 years ago

Thanks for working on this!

reynoldsbd2• 9 years ago

Thanks for your work on this! The addition and consistent improvement of the integrated terminal is the number one reason why VSCode is my daily driver.

kwood3• 9 years ago

The gained performance in the current release (and in Insiders for the past days) is huge - even without heaps of output. Those couple of milliseconds improved rendering time matter even if you "only" ls in a directory.

Thumbs up for this, Daniel. Thanks.

whatever_dude5• 9 years ago

It was noticeable, but only really bad in some very specific cases (disk I/O?).

majkinetor9• 9 years ago

Yeah, that was the main reason I didn't use it a lot actually. Powershell is slow to begin with and in VSC it was just 10x slower and buggy.

I am very happy that this is solved.

ParkerK3• 9 years ago

Man, I'd really like if they'd just add a default hotkey for 'Open Folder'. I know you can custom map hotkeys, but for an editor that's supposed to be 'easy to use out of the box', it's still lacking some basic features.

That being said, it's nice that they're improving it still

WorldMaker8• 9 years ago

Hitting F1 for the command palette tells me that the default shortcut for Open Folder is Ctrl+K Ctrl+O

WorldMaker8• 9 years ago

Even better, Open Recent is Ctrl+R which is handy enough I might remember it.

ParkerK3• 9 years ago

Huh, I guess it just isn't shown on the file menu then. Thanks!

christophilus• 9 years ago

VSCode really does improve with each release, and the monthly cycle is just about the perfect pace. This is a great example of how to run an OSS project.

I wonder how much Microsoft spends on it each month, and what value they see in it? Is it just a marketing expense? e.g. They fund VSCode in order to gain the good will of developers which they hope will turn into Azure or maybe Windows sales in the future?

Joeri• 9 years ago

VS Code is a web dev IDE. Microsoft has lost the mobile platform wars and pushing the web is a way of countering that. Plus, web and azure do go hand-in-hand, as you point out.

santaclaus3• 9 years ago

Nothing in VS Code is terribly web specific. I've been using it for C++ for which it works swimmingly.

kzisme5• 9 years ago

I've never heard of VS Code referred to as a web dev IDE - what makes you say that?

PopsiclePete• 9 years ago

I use it full time for C, Go, Python, Ruby and NodeJS development. Works well with Rust as well. Nothing "web"-specific about it, really.

pjmlp6• 9 years ago

They lost the mobile phone, but I bet they will win the hybrid tablet/netbooks one, given how Android tablets disappeared from many consumer shops here in Germany, only to be replaced by Windows 10 ones.

Samsung and Asus ones seem to have been the surviving brands and even they have Win10 devices on their brand sections.

segmondy• 9 years ago

This is a ridiculous comment. There are plugins for every language. I use VS and I don't use it for HTML/CSS or Javascript yet.

astrostl• 9 years ago

Python and CloudFormation here. Others swear by the Golang support.

WorldMaker8• 9 years ago

It's probably a complex set of factors including developer good will and competition in the marketplace (VSCode is obviously directly competing with Atom, for instance, which is also free).

One interest small piece of the larger puzzle is that the Monaco text editor at the heart of VSCode was originally built for Azure and Visual Studio Team Services cloud editing. It was then also subsequently embedded into IE's Dev Tools (and now Edge's Dev Tools). It's a neat example of building a tool for several existing needs embedded into existing products/projects and then finding that the same tool was also interesting as the core to its own product.

kzisme5• 9 years ago

VSCode vs Atom (in my opinion) isn't even a contest. Maybe Atom is super nice for some web dev stuff, but as a full flown IDE I just don't see the features.

hobo_mark• 9 years ago

I assumed the idea was also to eventually to get some users to move to the "real" visual studio, which I ended up doing at least to debug C++, except the vs editor is so much worse!

For example, I use Ctrl+D for multiple editing all the time and I converted other people to vscode based on that feature alone, yet it does not exist in visual studio...

whatever_dude5• 9 years ago

I'm probably wrong, but I get the feeling VSC is where all the MS devs that were fed up with Visual Studio politics moved to. They're able to get new features rolling much faster, rather than going against the ingrained assumptions of an Enterprise Application like VS.

I loved VS, but pro much stopped using it after starting to use VSC.

nikcub2• 9 years ago

VS Code is part of the strategy to get .NET Core distributed and to support the web layers built on top of that which mostly now use open source technology (from npm and bower through to grunt, typescript and angular)

nol13• 9 years ago

Na, I think the real plan starting to unfold. This week we get the new welcome screen, next will be the "deploy to Azure" and "how to make a Windows Store App" sidebar links.

(not that I'll stop using it, I'm sure someone will fork if gets too obnoxious)

CyanLite2• 9 years ago

It's the only practical way to do cross-platform .NET Core development.

floopidydoopidy• 9 years ago

If that's true, then I'd recommend not using either .NET or VSCode if cross platform matters to you.

Historically speaking, Microsoft will break compatibility when it suits them.

nikon• 9 years ago

Project Rider?

Yaggo• 9 years ago

They fund VSCode in order to gain the good will of developers which they hope will turn into Azure or maybe Windows sales in the future?

I think they are just trying to make Windows (and Microsoft) more relevant among web/foss developers by making sure that top-notch tools exist with first-class Windows support, so this falls to same category as Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Hydraulix9892• 9 years ago

Waiting for the rollback update. ;-)

Hydraulix9892• 9 years ago

Downvoted to oblivion, but I totally called it!!! 1.9.1 recovery build out today.

xmatos2• 9 years ago

Am I the only one who misses an apt repository?

ci5er• 9 years ago

You can use ubuntu-make, but it doesn't seem (to me) any easier than grabbing the .deb file...

xmatos2• 9 years ago

The point of having it in a repository is not managing it through apt, but updating it without having to manually download deb files...

randyrand• 9 years ago

How many people work on VSCode?

sz4kerto• 9 years ago

Approximately a dozen.

yokohummer78• 9 years ago

This is an off topic, but I just learned from the article that PowerShell will soon be the default in place of cmd.exe in Windows 10. I welcome this change as I found the experience of using PS was superior to that of bash/zsh in general cases.

But I hope they figured out the performance problem. As of writing, in the stable version of Windows 10, PS is perceptually slower than cmd, so I was forced to use PS only when needed. Funnily it was even slower in Windows 8, so the current affair is better than ever. But to be truly a default I think the performance of PS should at least match that of cmd.exe.

tonyedgecombe3• 9 years ago

PowerShell needs the .Net runtime so I doubt it will ever be on a par with cmd.exe.

pjmlp6• 9 years ago

cmd.exe has a limited set of builtin and relies on external applications with a plain text interface.

PowerShell has builtins, can import code from any .NET Assembly or native code DLL, invoke external processes, full featured programming language and structured data.

cmd.exe will never be on par with PowerShell.

stinos• 9 years ago

Yeah this is the one thing with PowerShell: with great power comes, erm, not so great performance. I've never been a full-time shell user so after years of occasionally getting some stuff automated using bash discovering Powershell really was like a breath of fresh air.. No more trying/failing to come up with the correct regex to parse the plain text spit out by tools. Command-line completion of arguments. A whole bunch of sane defaults and command names making things easy to discover. Etc. Now at first I only ran PS on a beefy workstation and didn't notice it was kinda slow (even for common operations). But on not-so-beefy machines: yeah, not nice. Then again, cmd is worthless in comparsion with PS so I stopped caring. Thing is also: the time gained by how fast I can get stuff done in PS probably makes up for the time lost trying to figure out the weird syntax of other shells, especially cmd.

chmln• 9 years ago

the experience of using PS was superior to that of bash

As a Linux dweller, I'm genuinely curious about this one. I've found PS inferior in just about any use case.

thomas11• 9 years ago

I've used both extensively and I think they are fairly different, with different strengths and weaknesses. Bash is more pragmatic and more concise on the command line. PS is more uniform in its design and nicer for scripting IMO. It allows passing objects through pipes, has built-in JSON reading and writing, built-in parameter handling with defaults, mandatory and optional params, switches etc., and such niceties.

majkinetor9• 9 years ago

I used majority of mainstream shells and Posh is a scpace ship compared to any other in existence. I wont reiterate again and again why, there are planty of places eihter on HN, reddit or SO why is it so. I guess you will have to give it a serious try.

jciochon• 9 years ago

I go back and forth between windows/unix for my day job and I also would be curious on any actual bullet points. I find that even in a situation where PS could potentially prove more useful or has an extra feature, what you end up with is a new set of chrome tabs open just to try and figure out how to do the thing.

I suppose this might(?) be mitigated if you're embedded in the .NET world, but I just can't seem to get the memory down for the silly cmdlet naming and since they also have the admittedly interesting object-piping thing going on, you're always battling two pain points at a time instead of just one (e.g. syntax/naming in bash)

yokohummer78• 9 years ago

I had been a full-time Linux (desktop) user for more than 10 years, and only recently made a transition to Windows. As I'm nowhere proficient at using PowerShell I might be overrating it a bit, as the grass is always greener on the other side. Anyways, what I found to be satisfying while using PS were:

1. The input/output is done using objects. I know that "inter-process communication should be done with text" is the UNIX philosophy, and I appreciated that when using Linux, but after using PS I started to have mixed feelings about that. When using bash/zsh, I typically used awk to extract the data I wanted from the text emitted by an external process. Doing so isn't hard, mostly as simple as using `awk {print $3}` or something like that, but it is still a bit annoyance and more importantly, vulnerable to the changes in the output format.

PS cmdlets communicate with themselves using objects, so it is very easy to extract some columns out of the command results. For example, when I query about a process in PS:

  PS> Get-Process -Name chrome
  
  Handles  NPM(K)    PM(K)      WS(K)     CPU(s)     Id  SI ProcessName
  -------  ------    -----      -----     ------     --  -- -----------
      362      80   169636     109896  36,411.16    484   1 chrome
      497     113   274988     132544   5,161.00    656   1 chrome
      404      84    87444      55356     303.56    764   1 chrome

If I want to extract CPU time and process ID:

  PS> Get-Process -Name chrome | Format-Table -Property cpu,id
  
           CPU    Id
           ---    --
  36441.265625   484
    5163.09375   656
      303.5625   764

Let's see what processes consumed the CPU most!

  PS> ps chrome | sort cpu -descending | select -first 3
  
  Handles  NPM(K)    PM(K)      WS(K)     CPU(s)     Id  SI ProcessName
  -------  ------    -----      -----     ------     --  -- -----------
     1186     317  1876160    1055016  88,462.64  10524   1 chrome
     1023      88  1825008     668684  37,740.92   6128   1 chrome
      362      80   155776      64560  36,848.00    484   1 chrome

As you can see, I can simply specify the column name(s).

This is probably why many Linux commands have detailed options to limit displayed information. For example, `uname` has -s, -r, -m, -p, and many others that are just portions of -a. If it were in PS there would be no other options than -a and users could utilize it accordingly. Likewise `ps` has many options just to control the output which is again not necessary in the PS's side.

Also due to the probable scripts that may be reliant on the column orders (e.g. my script assumes the third column to be always the one I wanted, because I hard-coded `awk {print $3}` in there), it is very hard to change the layout of the output in Linux commands. In PS there is no layout in the first place, so this backward compatibility concern doesn't exist.

2. Command names are much clearer. Many names are pretty descriptive so I don't have to remember the exact abbreviated forms, but at the same time they provide shorter aliases. For example `Get-Process` can also be called `ps`. bash/zsh can also benefit from this by manually assisning aliases, but I believe "sane defaults" should be long-descriptive names first, and abbreviated forms later.

3. Much more objected-oriented design. Say for example you want to get the last modified date of a file. In Linux I'd use `stat` and somehow extract information from it. Or, `stat` may have some option to print mtime so I may have to google for it. In PowerShell, I can use this instead:

  $file = Get-Item C:\Windows\notepad.exe
  $file.LastWriteTime

This also applies to the process example above:

  $processes = Get-Process -Name chrome
  $processes[0].CPU

All of these are benefited by tab completion, so you can easily find what properties any object has. This greatly improves discoverability, so that I don't need to rely on documentations (man pages on Linux, MSDN on Windows).

Not only that, but PS is much closer to a general-purpose programming language than bash/zsh. It has built-in calculations (no need to rely on expr/bc), and it even has some basic type safety, such as:

  PS> 1 + 2
  3
  PS> 1 + "a"
  Cannot convert value "a" to type "System.Int32". Error: "Input string was not in a correct format."
  + 1 + "a"
  + ~~~~~~~
      + CategoryInfo          : InvalidArgument: (:) [], RuntimeException
      + FullyQualifiedErrorId : InvalidCastFromStringToInteger

which might be silently ignored in bash/zsh in most cases. As you can see it even has fixed-width integer types (Int32), which is rarely seen in dynamic languages!

When the logic of my scripts got complicated, I tended to abandon shell scripts and start programming in Python. But after learning PowerShell I'm starting to have a confidence that typical workflows can be implemented in PowerShell, in a readable way. I even think that PS can be utilized as a general-purpose programming language, like, "Python without dependencies", because PS is installed by default on Windows nowadays.

Whoa, my response got unintentionally huge O.o. Hope this helps anyone.

hashhar2• 9 years ago

For one, I can do away with all of the text parsing that is prone to breakage in case a tool changes their output somewhat (or god help me - tools that can't handle unicode properly).

The power of bash actually comes from the GNU coreutils and other userland software. It has almost very little to with bash.

Try out bash on a busybox and feel the crippled effect.

dragonwriter• 9 years ago

PS is great if everything you are dealing with is built for the .NET ecosystem.

It's less great otherwise.

This makes it often great for working on Windows, and definitely great for working with Windows and other MS software that is designed for the .NET/PS world.

majkinetor9• 9 years ago

Yeah, the new Powershell will be very fast AFAIK. They had to do it because nano server was starting faster then Posh which was ridiculous.

rubber_duck5• 9 years ago

On that note if you are a .NET developer you owe yourself to learn PS and how to write cmdlets, it's such a powerful and easy way to expose a CLI for your .NET app compared to stdio and command line arguments parsing - it's incredibly powerful and trivial to do.

Unfortunately most .NET devs are programmers who grew up with VB, RAD and GUI tools they don't understand the value of exposing UNIX like small functionality CLI commands over big monolithic services, GUI apps, etc.

chadgeidel• 9 years ago

I've been dabbling with PS (using it as my primary console) but my workflow just isn't that complex, so I don't have a compelling reason to write cmdlets (yet!).

Can you recommend a good tutorial?

flukus4• 9 years ago

I'm a .net developer, I still install cygwin/bash on my computer because I can write stuff quicker and better. PS get's incredibly verbose for anything non trivial. I learned powershell long before bash too.

tracker12• 9 years ago

I learned C# with a big fat book, and the command line compiler... I understand the usefulness of command line applications.

However, when I need more than what a simple shell script gives me, I'm more inclined to reach for node, ruby or python than C#/.Net ... the overhead for a quick scripting environment is quite a bit lower than having to setup a project and build requirements. I've done both...

Why node, is simply npm... create a directory, npm init, write my script, etc. reference it from an alias or .cmd in my ~/bin directory (added to my path). Then it works in windows, mac and linux which I use all regularly. PS is mostly windows.

AsyncAwait9• 9 years ago

I am surprised at the amount of semi-negative comments here. Yes, some features are yet to be implemented, (it's still a fairly young project and you can always follow GitHub issues on progress), but for an Electron app, it's surprisingly fast and capable.

The Microsoft-developed Go plugin makes it the best Go IDE out there, the devs, (Ramya Rao etc.) are super responsive and really trying to resolve issues quickly.

If you haven't tried it yet, I think you really should and if you have found a problem, open an issue at https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode so the devs know about it, complaining doesn't help making it better. They generally release every month, so it will get fixed sooner rather than later.

P.S. Kudos to the team & contributors for another awesome release!

pjmlp6• 9 years ago

How does it compare to LiteIDE?

sagichmal• 9 years ago

I never understood LiteIDE, it was always extraordinarily esoteric and nonintuitive. VS Code is just fantastically better in comparison, in my opinion.

wattt3• 9 years ago

I have never heard of that, but I will share one thing I like about it as an IDE (and historically I have hated IDEs and used vim)... No config. Open a "folder", no project setup bullshit, and it remembers your work-state for each project/folder you open... And best part: autocomplete! But it is not heavy and slow. It does autocomplete per-file. So it does not need to analyse my entire project codebase, it just sees I used a word before and lets me tab to complete. So nice.

donatj• 9 years ago

I loved LiteIDE when I used it, the VSCode extension can do most of what LiteIDE does but in a much nicer UI and control.

computerex7• 9 years ago

I concur, the Go plugin is top notch. It even has a fantastic vim emulation plugin that works reasonably well.

wattt3• 9 years ago

It does. The only things quirky about it: command mode "up" button doesn't know about the history of past commands... Sucky for iterating on a regex. Undo is also broken, but it took me 2 full months to notice that the vim plugin broke undo!

testUser692• 9 years ago

All editors support go really well, that's because go has official tools that integrate with editors (guru, for example).

At the top of the read me is the feature list for the vscode-go:

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-go

This is the feature list for vim-go:

https://github.com/fatih/vim-go

looks a little longer, but if you notice they both use the same back end tools. I see that VSC has partial delve integration, but vim running inside tmux makes delve (and every other CLI tool) feel like it's already integrated. I don't use debugging that much with Go though.

AsyncAwait9• 9 years ago

Yeah, I know they all make use of godef, guru etc. but the way VSCode allows you to see declaration/documentation or full implementation on hover, integration with dlv etc. make it a nicer implementation for me than vim-go, but that's probably because I am not a ViM person myself.

jshen• 9 years ago

Anyone know if it works with the app engine runtime for go? I've never gotten anything to work for that except IntelliJ.

seabrookmx• 9 years ago

makes it the best Go IDE out there

I will respectfully disagree and say that gogland (while still in a pre-release state) is much much better.

alex_hitchins• 9 years ago

In what way is it better? Go in VSC is very, very nice. I can't think of any tooling I don't have available with this setup.

AsyncAwait9• 9 years ago

Gogland is great, but so far I haven't seen a feature that makes is strictly better, but I agree that it is a great alternative.

There is also the fact that VSCode is open-source.

grandalf• 9 years ago

As an emacs user, it's interesting to watch the race of open source extensible editors like Atom and VSCode.

I still haven't been tempted to leave emacs, but it's great to see so much progress in the ecosystem.

joekrill3• 9 years ago

I keep trying VSCode, but the main thing that keeps me going back to Atom is the fact that I have to do everything at the command line or by editing an enormous json file. Maybe I'm spoiled, but I'd much rather have a nice UI to deal with settings than have to figure out that, say, in order to show line numbers I have to modify "editor.lineNumbers" and set it to "on" (or is it "true"? or 1? I can't remember... let me go waste more time looking it up...)

mastax2• 9 years ago

While I agree that a real settings menu could be an improvement, they have made the settings experience better. They show a searchable annotated list of all the default settings on the left, and when you type a setting key in on the right it will show suggestions for possible values.

Looking at it just now, I also see that they added categories, and little edit buttons when you hover over a setting which allow you to click on what option you want. It's a bit strange to me that they're slowly turning a config file into a settings interface, but I guess it works fine for a Developer-focused product.

joekrill3• 9 years ago

Well that's good to know -- in that case I'll give it another shot.

majkinetor9• 9 years ago

This is preciselly the reason I and many of my collegues love it - no GUI for settings. This means you can use hundreeds of tools to manage your settings and it is in true spirit of unix philosophy to keep everything as a text file.

Much more time is wasted by looking for options in GUI equivalent and reproducibility, sharing, backup and comparing (diff) are way harder or nonexistent. Creating frontend for it is trivial, but honestly, why drop from horse to donkey as they say.

All the apps should have settings like that.

vvanders• 9 years ago

Seriously, Ctrl+Shift+P and start typing gets me to what I need 99% of the time, it's glorious.

Combined with the VIM plugin and I rarely need to touch the mouse.

joekrill3• 9 years ago

To your point, Atom allows both. Don't like the UI? Just edit config.cson or whatever directly! You're not locked into it.

I just find that if I have to go through a LOT more steps without a UI.

yokohummer78• 9 years ago

Yeah, like many others I maintain my configuration files in Git, so having to use files to configure is a pro, not a con, at least for me! I haven't been using VS Code but this sole factor might be the reason I will reconsider using it in the future.

Some might say having both manual configuration and automated dialog would be better, but many such interfaces ruin the structures of my intentionally organized setting files. I will take no GUI than misbehaving GUI at any time.

st3v3r4• 9 years ago

I don't get that mindset at all. I can see desiring a file/command line interface for settings, but to want no GUI option at all for others is just strange.

titanix2• 9 years ago

I share your opinion on the settings and command line. While I like it to loads faster than full fledged Visual Studio, in a year or so of using it on Mac OS I still doesn't use even 1% of its features because they are not _discoverable_ at all. Modifying or doing anything beyond text editing require googling. The same apply for using langages extensions beyond syntax coloring. Even Intellisense does not works as expected out of the box so I don't use it.

AsyncAwait9• 9 years ago

still doesn't use even 1% of its features because they are not _discoverable_ at all.

There are now categories in the settings file, a search bar and auto-completion, which should make discovery easier.

The same apply for using langages extensions beyond syntax coloring.

Do you mean to say that extensions at https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/VSCode are hard for you to discover or that too much of your required functionality is in extensions?

Even Intellisense does not works as expected out of the box so I don't use it.

If you have found a bug, it would be great to report it at https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues

rehemiau• 9 years ago

How often do you change these settings, though? I choose VSCode for the performance and great addons.

sljkdjaldjo• 9 years ago

well, it's an editor for programming. those tools are usually all about typing text, automatically completing text, and validating text. appling those idea to a json config file shouldn't be allien to a programmer.

alkonaut• 9 years ago

I use fancy autocompleting and validating text editor for exactly that reason - remembering if it's "on" or "true" or "yes" is too much overhead.

So yeah, json or (preferably) any other markup for settings is fine so long as it hints me with possible values as I type, tooltips each variable with its meaning and so on.

david-given2• 9 years ago

Take another look. What you get now is still a gigantic JSON file... except it opens in a two-pane window, with the default settings (including detailed documentation in comments) on the left, and your local copy on the right. And beside each setting on the left is an icon where, if you press it, it copies the setting into your local copy, with all the correct JSON syntax. And usually there's a dropdown showing the different valid options and it uses folding to divide neatly up into sections. Oh, and the settings instantly apply when you save the file.

To me, this combines the best parts of being a text file --- standard commands, formatting the way you like it, you can search it, version controllable --- with the best parts of a GUI --- prompting as to what options are available, easy selection of alternates, documentation, etc. It's an amazingly good implementation and I wish more applications used it.

(e.g. the comment for editor.lineNumbers now tells me that valid options are 'on', 'off' and 'relative', which counts relative to the line the cursor is on.)

nikcub2• 9 years ago

Two things to add:

The settings files now have intellisense in them so you don't have to lookup each option.

You can also have a separate settings.json file for that project and check it into git inside the .vscode folder and make those same settings available to your entire team.

We use that in every project and it is great.

whatever_dude5• 9 years ago

I'd much rather have a nice UI to deal with settings than have to figure out that, say, in order to show line numbers I have to modify "editor.lineNumbers" and set it to "on" (or is it "true"? or 1? I can't remember... let me go waste more time looking it up...)

Maybe you've taken a look at it a while ago. It's still a big json file (great! everything at hand) but very easy to edit since it provides a lot of assistance: there's icons to set a new option, references for everything, and intellisense/autocompletion for the schema of every option you want to change. It'll even show invalid options with a squiggle (e.g. when some setting becomes deprecated).

IMO it's the best way to have settings in an app, especially when you can install extensions that adds settings of their own or when you want settings to be version-controllable.

raspo• 9 years ago

I find it kind of funny that most screenshots are taken from MacOS :)

joaodlf2• 9 years ago

I use vs code for Go development and it's pretty amazing. Slowly starting to use it in other languages as well, but the Go support is really 5*.

kzisme5• 9 years ago

How do you like working with Go? I've been meaning to start trying it out here soon, but haven't looked very far. I'm coming from a C# background.

computerex7• 9 years ago

I come from C#. Golang is nice and simple. I really miss generics. Going from the expressiveness of C# to golang is hard at first.

partisan2• 9 years ago

I use it for F# and Nim and while there are some flaws, it's the best experience on linux for these two languages. It also lowers the bar to entry on other languages, e.g. Go, which is on my list of to-learns.

legulere• 9 years ago

It's nice that they added an option to change the side of the close button. But way more important are sensible defaults, and that should be on the left side for mac os.

Still I am a very happy user of Visual Studio Code.

ridiculous_fish6• 9 years ago

I'm used to being able to run my program via command-R or some other key equivalent. I haven't been able to find a way to do this conveniently from VSCode. How do other VSCode users run their programs?

tonyedgecombe3• 9 years ago

F5 is the default but you can set your own keyboard shortcuts from the File->Preferences->Keyboard Shortcuts menu

ridiculous_fish6• 9 years ago

There appears to be no way to bind a keyboard shortcut for running an arbitrary task. https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/6550

By default F5 is "continue debugging," but debugging is limited to Node, so I don't think that's what I want.

Incidentally my MBP has no F5 key :)

WorldMaker8• 9 years ago

The Tasks system in VSCode is quite powerful: https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/editor/tasks

Also, the integrated Terminal (Ctrl+`) is more useful with each version.

ridiculous_fish6• 9 years ago

How do you (personally) use tasks? Do you bind a key to the "Run Task" command and then type the task name in? Doesn't that feel inefficient?

I'm just trying to get the edit/build/run cycle down. So far the "run" part is missing for me.

kwood3• 9 years ago

Apart from the built in task runner system, you can always use an extension that does a "classic" command-R.

I use https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=formulah... and bound it to exactly this key.

thiht• 9 years ago

Great release and awesome release notes, as always. Many thanks to the team for such a great editor!

I'm especially thrilled by the integrated terminal improvements.

dlbucci• 9 years ago

I was just thinking how much of a pain it was to switch from the output pane to the debug console, so I like the new tabs.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to run my launch task in my second window anymore...

didip• 9 years ago

For those of you who use VS Code,

how fast is it when grepping large number of files? Is it at least comparable to Sublime Text?

rockdoe3• 9 years ago

I have no idea about Sublime Text but find-symbol for example is slow. Maybe they should take a good look at ripgrep.

kwood3• 9 years ago

Can't compare to Sublime myself, but the global search got some major overhaul and is doing parallel searches since the last release (1.8). Can't complain about the speed.

jrwiegand• 9 years ago

I am really hopeful for the enhanced scrollbar to be implemented soon. After that, I am pretty well set with vscode.

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/4865

manishsharan• 9 years ago

I feel so guilty using this because I did not renew my license for Webstorm. I used to love webstorm but the javascript development environment/ecosystem has come such a long way since when I first purchased Webstorm.

computerex7• 9 years ago

I used to use PHP Webstorm. Its lightning fast search is awesome, but it slows to a crawl for large codebases.

13years3• 9 years ago

I am really loving VS Code. However, there are 2 big things I really need to give up Brackets/WebStorm entirely.

1) Jump to definition for plain JS. Both Brackets and WebStorm can find method definitions for any JS project.

2) Multiline searches. I use this quite a lot to find files that contain 2 terms on different lines.

computerex7• 9 years ago

1) I can already do this, just hold down control or command then hover over the symbol?

13years3• 9 years ago

Doesn't work for any of my JS projects. However, Brackets and WebStorm work just fine. It does work for my TypeScript projects.

Edit: It does work on some symbols in JS projects. But it doesn't work on function calls. Example: 'object.methodName()' I can't click on methodName and have it find the source. Brackets and WebStorm find all possible definitions, if there is only 1, it will take you directly there, if there are multiple, then you get a list to choose from

vgy7ujm5• 9 years ago

It's nicer than Atom and almost feels as snappy as Sublime. But Vim still is miles better when you have put in the work to become proficient. MacVim works great for retina screens and high color support.

computerex7• 9 years ago

The VIM emulation plugin actually works reasonably well.

vgy7ujm5• 9 years ago

I know but it's not Vim.. I have been using VScode for the past 6 months and it was a relief to get back to Vim. Productivity skyrocketed since I am not constantly trying new plugins, wrestling with not knowing the IDE well enough, hard wired Vim/terminal brain etc.

And just small stuff that is not working or works another way quickly gets very annoying.

I use more than basic editing.

Lio2• 9 years ago

The same is true for Neovim (and Vim 8?) in the terminal too.

codingmatty• 9 years ago

The problem that I have with VSC releases is that they are automatic, and I don't want to screw up my current workflow when I reset the application for an update. I have wasted hours before with VSC updates.

majkinetor9• 9 years ago

You have an option to disable automatic VSC update. You can also update it via chocolatey.

dsaw• 9 years ago

You can set "update.channel" : "none" in your User Settings. (I was also bitten by it once)

aphextron2• 9 years ago

Am I alone in rejecting this new wave of Electron/node-webkit based text editors? Every single one I've tried has been horribly slow, unstable, and a giant resource hog. I gave Atom a shot, and it crashed on importing a .csv file of a few thousand lines. What I want from a text editor is simply that: a text editor. For anything more advanced, move up to a proper IDE. Why anyone uses these over something like Sublime or NP++ blows me away.

plexicle• 9 years ago

So.. have you even tried Code? It doesn't sound like you have. It's quite fast.

aphextron2• 9 years ago

Sure I have, and it's had the same issues in my opinion

13years3• 9 years ago

Depends on what features are important to you.

On my system, the new parallel file search from VS Code is an order of magnitude faster than Sublime. For example, searching my entire project is 2 secs in VS Code vs 20 sec in Sublime

therealmarv2• 9 years ago

Comparing atom and vscode is like comparing apples to oranges. They are sharing only Electron and nothing else. Some people do not want a full blown IDE (all of them are slower than VSCode) but also do not want a bare naked editor... I tried getting Sublime as feature rich as VSCode + one python plugin. Sublime was loosing and using most of the time more resources (Anaconda plugin)... code completion, auto suggestion, method jumping, inline help... everything was better in VSCode. Also not to mention the amount of help in other languages like JS. But if I would handle really big files without logic I would probably stick more to sublime.

mixedCase2• 9 years ago

My main laptop broke down and I'm currently using a Pentium Dual Core T3200, 3GB of RAM, an HDD... in other words, a pretty damn old laptop.

I knew VSCode was very optimized for an Electron application, but you have no idea how fast this is. This is faster than my Vim set-up, and I have taken my sweet time making sure Vim only loads the plugins it strictly needs and I try to switch to the asynchronous version of a plugin as soon as it pops up but still, VSCode is more consistently responsive for a lot of tasks.

I'm not sure wether I'll make a full switch yet, specially once I get a proper computer back, but the quality of the plugin ecosystem (I thought vim-go was amazing, but VSCode's Go plugin is just ridiculously good and properly asynchronous) coupled with this huge performance surprise are really making me consider it.

ParkerK3• 9 years ago

I use Atom over Sublime simply because Sublime doesn't support touch screen scrolling, and it's just second nature for me to touch and drag my screen when scrolling now.

VSCode is apparently faster than Atom, and I sped Atom up considerably by disabling languages that I rarely/never use. Timecop plugin does wonders for tracking down the slow plugins

eob• 9 years ago

VSCode + TypeScript is the perfect foot-in-door for MS to get into the web space.

They're both excellent products by themselves, but also give Microsoft the platform to start dangling turnkey Azure integration in front of developers.

Imagine if the IDE started to offer the ability to configure, deploy, and manage targeted production stacks--no browser / command line hackery required. That would be compelling.

rcarmo• 9 years ago

You can do that right now if you use Azure ARM templates and set up project-level actions to run them through the Azure CLI. It's just a matter of someone bundling it together as an extension (I've been working on one, but solely for template snippets).

therealmarv2• 9 years ago

Does anybody know a way to have better window management in VSCode? I really don't like to split always and use the mouse to drag and drop... often I use two panes and I want to duplicate view in them. Hoping for something like the Sublime Origami plugin (which was perfect for me).

whatever_dude5• 9 years ago

Check the shortcuts. There's a lot of shortcuts to manipulate the tabs.

moogly• 9 years ago

I really like VS Code, and try to use it as much as possible, but I can't make it my main driver until they've added more detailed theming support. Textmate themes aren't good enough. I can't get used to such basic highlighting that doesn't even come close to ReSharper's with "Color identifiers" enabled.

Lord_Zane• 9 years ago

Setting "window.menuBarVisibility": "hidden" works at first, but then dosent work if I close and open vscode, anyone else have this problem?

jhasse2• 9 years ago

Yes, I'm experiencing the same problem :(

I'm using Linux btw.

jszymborski2• 9 years ago

I've been gradually finding myself using vscode over atom more and more, but the thing I consistently miss are Sublime-like shortcuts like Ctrl+D to duplicate a line or Ctrl+Click to add a cursor.

parenthephobia• 9 years ago

It's an extra key press, but ctrl-c copies the current line if there's no selection; then ctrl-v pastes it in front of the next line.

Alt-click adds a cursor. :)

Also, alt-up/down adds cursors above or below the current cursors.

jszymborski2• 9 years ago

you're a lifesaver, kind stranger

whatever_dude5• 9 years ago

It has a lot of shortcuts for features that are just not set by result. Take a look at the keyboard shortcut file and search for something, or install one of the templates that mimic other editors.

lukasm• 9 years ago

How to do search within search? E.g. I look in my src/ for json, but I get 50 results. In Sublime the result is a file so I can cmd+F it. Not sure how to do it here though.

jinmingjian• 9 years ago

Kudos!

VSC is an "redefined" and high hackable (largely thanks to the rich nodejs ecosystem) editing environment which you can do everything as you like. So, to pin it into an editor or an IDE makes less sense.

more technical imagination: the project lead Erich Gamma has long history works in the field of Eclipse and definitely knows the importance (and pain) of the code editing to a programmer. Then, I (and we) can expect VSC would go beyond the Eclipse and hunt the heart of coders from other IDE products some day:)

final shameless insert: recently I release an extension to provide Swift editing environment[1] to try to bring Go/Rust like experiment for Swift server side development. Now it works for both Linux and macOS.(I hope to investigate the possibility for windows 10 WSL after release 2.0 coming soon.)

[1] https://github.com/jinmingjian/sde

vikingcaffiene• 9 years ago

I was a die hard ST3 user and Microsoft hater and I begrudgingly gave VS Code a shot after a dev I respected gave it a shout out on twitter. After a day of heavy use it became my daily driver. It is a great balance of speed, configurability, and features. Very impressed and highly recommend giving it a shot. Its just getting better and better.

candiodari• 9 years ago

Given that this runs on electron, which is basically a web browser with a node backend, is it possible to run this either as a webserver or otherwise remotely ?

I'd like to run this with the webserver running on a big dev machine at work and the client at work. X forwarding is not working well for me at least.

gpm• 9 years ago

I use sshfs for that. `sshfs username@remoteserver:/directory/to/mount mount_point` lets me edit the remote files locally. Then I compile and run (via mosh, which is like ssh but better, particularly if you have crappy internet) on remoteserver.

wattt3• 9 years ago

I have used vim for years and I was tasked with making an Electron app for a client so I tried vscode... And I love it! I still use vim for sysadmin things but it has been the first thing Microsoft has made since the original Natural Keyboard that I absolutely love. It is good. I recommend it to others. I hate bloated editors and it is good... No config/setup process either - the defaults are enough!

tracker12• 9 years ago

I do tweak a few of the defaults. I use it on windows, linux and mac and they vary, so I like them consistent (linux line endings by default, 2-spaces, etc).

I agree that it's one of the best products from MS today... I keep hoping that they take this as a model and re-create SQL Management Studio as an Electron app as well (I know about the VS Code extension).

I had tried electron and brackets before VS Code, and was skeptical... other than a few learning curves in the UX, it's been great. I don't think anything compares in terms of the plugin ecosystem either (though might not quite mach sublime).

ikurei• 9 years ago

I'm very curious: Don't you miss Vim? After using it for years, doesn't editing code in anything else feel wrong?

I'm all day switching between VSCode and Vim. VSCode's support for my toolset (nodejs, es6, jsx, flowtype, mustachejs...) is fantastic, but even with the (fairly good) Vim plugin, I miss Vim. Whenever something doesn't work in Vimified-VSCode as I expect, it breaks my brain and my focus a bit.

What's so great in VSCode that you abandoned something that, I imagine, was embedded in your head already?

nojvek• 9 years ago

I worked on the debug inline values feature. Let me know if you have any feedback/questions regarding that. Its currently disabled for evaluation purposes but you can enable in settings via "debug.inlineValues": true

http://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_9#_inline-variable-v...

edwardmarriner• 9 years ago

Thanks for all your hard work on this feature, it looks great!

btbuilder• 9 years ago

Alternatively I have been using IntelliJ with the Go plugin for about a year and now the Gogland EAP.

It has some really cool features like VCS integration, "TODO" panel and "goto" functionality that works through interfaces. You can "Goto Super Method" to jump to the definition of an interface function that the highlighted function implements. You can also do the reverse which is to list all the structs that implement an interface, or a specific interface function.

theshire• 9 years ago

Would be great if they implement Brackets Live preview mode.

sunnyps• 9 years ago

I work on Chromium and I test every VS Code version to see how it performs with the Chromium source code (except third_party). This is the first time I'm impressed. My observations:

1. Go to file is a little bit slower than Sublime Text but the extra features in VS Code make that tradeoff worthwhile. 2. The C/C++ extension enables go to definition/header without any extra configuration. 3. I like that it runs on top of Electron which is after all a fork of Chromium. 4. I haven't tried the debugger yet but I'm hopeful that will work fine too.

I'll keep playing around with it and maybe even switch from Sublime Text.

arwhatever• 9 years ago

Might be interesting to see a case study from this team, their engineering practices, etc. They seem to be remarkably productive and successful and to iterate quickly.

amzans• 9 years ago

For about a year it has been my favorite editor when writing in Go and pretty much anything that's not Java.

I think the team behind it has been doing fantastic work. Thank you guys.

rado• 9 years ago

"Format on Paste" could convert me from Coda, but it doesn't seem to work. macOS, HTML mode, enabled the option, restarted, doesn't format until I manually execute the Format Document command.

riejo• 9 years ago

That's most likely because the html formatter doesn't support to format range/selection but only the full document.

sdoering• 9 years ago

Ohhhh I love the new 'Synchonized Markdown" feature. This will in the end replace the need for iA writer (that I happily paid for) on my machine. As I do have a workflow already setup to (Semi-)automate creation of files from .md I now can do this inside VSC and do not need to open another application.

simooooo• 9 years ago

Thanks for bringing this feature up.. I had no idea the markdown preview feature even existed!

blunte• 9 years ago

I am super pleased that VS Code exists, works on multiple platforms, and is apparently a first class project at MS Dev. Like some other devs, I ran as far from Microsoft as I could many years ago... but now it seems they are trying to be more open, or less protectionist/monopolistic.

I used VS Code (starting at v1.5) for a couple of projects (on my Mac), and I found it quite effective and very performant. The performance, particularly the interface latency, is a big complaint I have with other "fat" IDEs. And while my hands still try to do some Vi commands and a lot of Emacs commands, I found the keyboard options for VS Code acceptable.

This is as close to a Thank You to Microsoft that I have uttered in a long time. I hope they keep up the good work.

yAnonymous• 9 years ago

I'm critical of Microsoft and everything related to it, but I'm impressed with the whole VS Code project.

The team makes very sane development decisions. Code offers a great UI, is fast and configurable. Bugs and issues are handled quickly and despite already having overtaken all other editors IMHO, there's a constant stream of improvements that are documented nicely with every update.

Good job.

johnchristopher• 9 years ago

Can anybody explain how I can get a `jump to function defintions` when working with PHP files ? (defintions might be in included files)

This is the one thing I'd really like to figure out (be it out of the box or with a plugin).

alexdoma• 9 years ago

This version introduced a non-trivial bug for me; When I open a file to edit through nautilus, it opens in a new window instead of reusing the existing one.

The new settings (window.openFilesInNewWindow and window.openFoldersInNewWindow) don't help no matter what when I set them to 'off'

EDIT: Fixed it on Ubuntu by removing the '--new-window-if-not-first' argument from the code.desktop related command.

    sudo nano /usr/share/applications/code.desktop
    # set: Exec=/usr/share/code/code %U

Tyriar3• 9 years ago

Thanks for pointing this out, expect a fix to come soon in the recovery build. https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/19775

Visual Studio Code 1.9

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