The July update to VS Code, Microsoft’s multiplatform Visual Studio tool, presents a variety of updates that benefit developers across several languages. ECMAScript6 (ES6) support is one of the highlights of this release, but all users of the program will likely find useful enhancements—especially those using Git or larger multi-file projects.
Two new command line options should benefit developers who want to more closely integrate VS Code into their workflow. As originally requested by Unity developers, the options –r and –g facilitate opening a file in the last active window, at a specific line and column in that file. –r (or --reuse-window) will also start a new file in the last active window. –g (or --goto) allows a file to be open a specific line and (optionally) at a specific column. Multiple files can be opened at a time using these options.
A frequently feature is the ability to trim trailing whitespace when a file is saved. This can now enabled with the files.trimTrailingWhitespace setting. A lightweight pattern matcher has been added to allow for more complex operations in the editor and when searching. These include character matching operators (* or ?), matching path segments, and range matches. Operators can be used to exclude files from the VS Code’s explorer or the search functionality.
Users of Git will appreciate that VS Code will now prompt for login credentials as needed when accessing Git repositories. In previous editions this lack of a prompt could cause the Git tools in VS Code to be non-responsive as the tool waited for credentials that the user didn’t know it had to supply. Multiline Git commit messages are now supported, as is the ability to select multiple files for committing or staging. Auto fetch is also configurable, so it can disabled if you would rather not have it updating without request.
VS Code is available free of charge for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux based systems. By default, Windows and Mac OS X users will receive automatic updates to VS Code after installing this release. This behavior may be disabled if the user so desires. Full release notes about this release are available on the Updates section of VS Code’s homepage.
