Microsoft has released v0.3 of its native Visual Studio application, bringing with it support for Rust, as well as changes to keybindings.
Unveiled in April of this year, Visual Studio Code is a code-focused editor for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
In the blog post announcing the latest release, the VS Code team covers the update of languages in version 0.3.0. Support for the Rust programming language has been added for both colorisation and bracket matching, while the language service for TypeScript has been updated for v1.5 of the language, auto closing of tags in HTML have been replaced by smarter IntelliSense, and JavaScript developers now have the option to turn off all semantic and syntax checks.
By popular demand, keybindings are changed in Visual Studio Code 0.3. While there aren't any links to specific comments, the team says they received "strong feedback" on the issue and as a result have restored the native File Open dialog to unassigned, to avoid confusion using this key for the Code File Open dialog, now accessible via ⌘P. Also updated in keybindings is the Go To Definition. Instead of using Ctrl+F12 on Windows, feedback to align the definition with Visual Studio has been taken on board, changing it to F12.
For debugging, the latest Virtual Studio Code comes with a number of updates, in particular with added support for F# debugging on Mono on OS X and Linux.
V0.3 has also added TypeScript debugging supporting JavaScript source maps. This can be enabled by developers in the launch configuration by setting the sourceMaps attribute to true. Furthermore, a TypeScript file can also now be specified with the program attribute. Other debugging changes in the release include an update so that VS Code no longer "inadvertently hijacks an arbitrary terminal on OS X when starting a launch session. Only a terminal previously used for debugging is reused for a new session."
VS Code's FAQ note that they hope to provide support for ASP.NET 5 debugging in the future, but that is not currently supported on any platform, including running ASP.NET 5 on Mono on OS X and Linux.
In editing, the release comes with several multi-cursor improvements, including making ⌘D select the word at the cursor, or the next occurrence of the current selection.
Reactions to the release from the Visual Studio community have been strongly favourable, most notably in connection to the changes to editing. On Reddit, in the programming discussion Visual Studio Code 0.3.0, user MrCzar said, "I understand it might be a bit superficial, but this feature is the thing that I loved the most in SublimeText. I am glad VSC has this now, I really like the editor."
Oher users were quick to point out that this was not so shallow. User cstever responded "Word selection is not superficial. Saving key strokes while programming is a great thing: it makes for better flow and efficiency" and user mailto_devnull said that for them the support for ⌘D was "perhaps the only real reason" they had "switched back after trialling VSC."
Issues planned for fixing in future releases include a lack of ES6 syntax support and commenting in XML.
