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August 2018 (version 1.27)

Update 1.27.2: The update addresses these issues.

Downloads: Windows: x64 | Mac: Intel | Linux 64-bit: deb rpm tarball | 32-bit: deb rpm tarball

Welcome to the August 2018 release of Visual Studio Code. There are a number of significant updates in this version that we hope you will like, some of the key highlights include:

If you'd like to read these release notes online, go to Updates on code.visualstudio.com.
You can also check out this 1.27 release highlights video from Cloud Developer Advocate Brian Clark.

Insiders: Want to see new features as soon as possible? You can download the nightly Insiders build and try the latest updates as soon as they are available. And for the latest Visual Studio Code news, updates, and content, follow us on Twitter @code!

Workbench

Settings editor

Over the past few months, we've been developing a GUI for editing settings. In 1.27, we are making it the default settings editor.

Settings UI

You can still access the JSON settings editor, either by using the command Preferences: Open User Settings (JSON) or by changing your default settings editor with the "workbench.settings.editor" setting.

One improvement we made this month is to clean up the UI by moving setting value descriptions (enumDescriptions) into a custom dropdown control:

dropdown

Settings that have been modified are now indicated with a blue line, like modified lines in the editor. The gear icon opens a context menu with an option to reset the setting to its default value.

modified indicator and context menu

Setting values are now validated, and any validation errors are displayed.

validation error

The table of contents now will remain visible during search, and filter to show only categories that have matches. You can click on a category to filter the results to just settings under that category. Set "workbench.settings.settingsSearchTocBehavior" to "hidden" if you prefer to hide the table of contents during search.

settings search

When you search in settings, our Bing-powered search service is still providing results that it thinks are relevant. Now, that service will also show you extensions from the Marketplace that have relevant settings. You will see a button at the bottom of the settings search results, Show matching extensions. When clicked, the Extensions view will open with the matching extensions.

extension settings

Custom title bar and menus on Windows and Linux

Also over the past few iterations, we have been working to improve the look and feel as well as usability of the title bar and menus on Windows and Linux. This iteration, we are removing the preview label with an aim to make this the default experience on Windows soon. To enable this feature, you can set the setting "window.titleBarStyle" to "custom".

Custom Title Bar and Menus

The new experience comes with several advantages over the default:

  • Themable title bar, menu bar, and context menus throughout the product. This means your dark theme stays dark!
  • Better keyboard navigation in the menu bar. We have made it easier to switch between menus with the keyboard and use menu mnemonics.
  • A less intrusive menu bar. The new experience is more compact and less jarring when setting "window.menuBarVisibility" to "toggle".
  • Better accessibility. Several accessibility issues have been resolved to improve menu usability with a screen reader.

As we want to make this new experience the default on Windows, we encourage you to try it out and send us your feedback so we can provide the best possible experience.

Breadcrumbs improvements

We have tweaked the new breadcrumbs bar, made various improvements, and fixed bugs:

  • Focused document symbols are now highlighted in the editor.
  • Breadcrumbs are automatically enabled when the focus command (⇧⌘; (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+;)) is run.
  • Breadcrumbs work a lot better with themes.
  • Breadcrumbs now honor the file excludes configuration.

Breadcrumbs Highlights

New Terminal menu

The Tasks menu was renamed to Terminal and some more entries for the Integrated Terminal were added.

Terminal Menu

Platform specific keybindings

It's now possible to enable keyboard shortcuts for specific operating systems using isLinux, isMac and isWindows within a keybinding's when clause:

[
  {
    "key": "ctrl+o",
    "command": "workbench.action.files.openFolder",
    "when": "!isMac"
  },
  {
    "key": "cmd+o",
    "command": "workbench.action.files.openFolder",
    "when": "isMac"
  }
]

This makes it much easier to share your keybindings.json file across different machines.

Open window as new native tab

A new macOS-only command, workbench.action.newWindowTab, opens a window as new native tab. newWindowTab does not have a default keybinding and needs the setting window.nativeTabs to be enabled.

Files no longer close when deleted/renamed externally

We changed the default of the workbench.editor.closeOnFileDelete setting from true to false. This means that a file that has been deleted or renamed outside of VS Code (or by another program like Git or command from the Integrated Terminal) will no longer close a file that is opened as editor tab. Instead, the file will indicate that it has been deleted from disk and you can just save the file to restore it.

Deleted from Disk

Note: Unless the file is dirty, the contents of the file are not preserved between restarts.

Middle click to open file in a new editor

Now it is possible to use the middle mouse click in the Explorer view to open a file in a new editor and not reuse the previous editor in preview mode.

Accessibility improvements

We have fixed quite some accessibility issues - mostly around keyboard navigation, screen reader support, and focus. The full list can be found here. This is an ongoing effort which we plan to continue in September.

Improved Windows background update

We've done some stability work on our custom Windows background updater, in order to address issues resulting in broken installations for some users. This is a continuous work item with more improvements in upcoming releases.

Editor

Auto closing & surrounding characters

When typing certain brackets like {, [ or (, depending on the programming language, they will get auto-closed by default when they are followed by specific characters that typically cannot start an expression, for example ;:.,=}])>. This behavior can be customized with the editor.autoClosingBrackets setting. Similarly, it is possible to customize the auto closing behavior while typing quotes like ", ' or ` with editor.autoClosingQuotes.

When text is selected and you type one of these characters, the selection will be surrounded by brackets or quotes. It is now possible to adjust this behavior separately via the new editor.autoSurround setting.

Languages

Path completion for CSS imports

Path completion for CSS, SCSS and Less @import is now available. SCSS partial @import is handled as well.

css-import

Jump to definition for CSS links

There is now jump to definition for @import and url() links in CSS, SCSS and Less.

css-definition

JSON

The built-in JSON language extension now supports the new JSON Schema Draft-07.

The most interesting addition are the if, then, else keywords to allow conditional schema evaluation.

{
  "type": "integer",
  "minimum": 1,
  "maximum": 1000,
  "if": { "minimum": 100 },
  "then": { "multipleOf": 100 },
  "else": {
    "if": { "minimum": 10 },
    "then": { "multipleOf": 10 }
  }
}

The if keyword means that, if the result of the value schema passes validation, apply the then schema, otherwise apply the else schema.

HTML

The HTML formatter has been updated to version 1.8.1 of JS Beautifier.

This adds a new option to the "html.format.wrapAttributes" settings:

  • "aligned-multiple" will wrap attributes when the maximum line length is reached and aligns all wrapped lines with the first attribute.

aligned-multiple

TypeScript 3.0.3

VS Code now ships with TypeScript 3.0.3. This minor release fixes a number of bugs and improves stability. You can read about the complete set of changes here.

Debugging

Loaded Scripts view now reusable

For more than a year, the Loaded Scripts Explorer in the Debug view was contributed by the Node.js debug extension and was not available to other debuggers. In this release, we've added the Loaded Scripts view as a built-in debugger feature. All debug extensions that have the notion of "scripts" will be able to support access to their scripts in a dynamically updated view.

In addition, we've improved some shortcomings of the old Loaded Scripts Explorer:

  • Chains of single-child folders are now collapsed into a single node. This makes it much easier to drill down into deep but sparse folder hierarchies.
  • We've started to address accessibility issues.

Middle click to remove breakpoints

Now it is possible to use the middle mouse click in the breakpoints view to easily remove a breakpoint.

Change the default for "openDebug" to open on every session start

For new users, it can sometimes be confusing when you start a debug session and the debug view does not open automatically every time. If the user is not yet familiar with the UI, they don't know what keywords to look for in order to open the UI. To avoid confusion, we changed the default of debug.openDebug to be openOnSessionStart so that the debug view opens on every session start, not only on the first (which was the previous default behavior).

Extension Authoring

Extension logging

The ExtensionContext that comes as an argument of the activate function has a new property logPath. This is the absolute file path of a directory where extensions can store log files. The path is unique for an extension and not reused by other extensions.

Language Server Protocol

A new version of the Language Server Protocol is available and includes the corresponding node modules for use with VS Code.

The new version has support for:

  • Code Action kind announcements from the server to allow clients to populate corresponding menu entries.
  • An implementation for a textDocument/prepareRename.
  • Support for file operations (create, rename and delete) in Workspace Edits.

vscode-languageclient: JSON log format and log streaming

Previously, when building Language Server extensions using vscode-languageclient, you could specify [langId].trace.server to send LSP logs into a VS Code output channel.

[langId].trace.server can now output logging information in a machine-readable JSON format:

"languageServerExample.trace.server": {
  "format": "json", // or "text"
  "verbosity": "verbose" // or "off" | "messages"
}

This opens up interesting use cases, such as streaming LSP logs into an LSP Inspector to visualize the behavior of a Language Server:

lsp-streaming

You can learn more about it in Microsoft/language-server-protocol-inspector and lsp-log-streaming-sample.

Debug extensions: Built-in Loaded Scripts view

The Loaded Scripts Explorer is now a built-in component of the VS Code debugger. In order to use it, a debugger extension needs to change its debug adapter in the following way:

  • Add a supportsLoadedSourcesRequest capability with a value true to the Capabilities returned from the initialize request.
  • Implement the loadedSources request by returning the current set of loaded sources.
  • Send out loadedSource events for newly loaded or unloaded sources.

New theme colors

There is a new theme color for breadcrumbs:

  • breadcrumb.background: Background color of breadcrumb items.

There are new theme colors for the settings editor:

  • settings.dropdownListBorder: Border color of the new dropdown control.
  • settings.modifiedItemIndicator: The color of the line that indicates a modified setting.

Git extension API

The Git extension has started to expose a more defined API. This API can be used from any other extension to interact the open Git repositories in a user's workspace. Since it is still in its preliminary stages, we will continuously improve the API in the upcoming releases.

Proposed Extension APIs

Every milestone comes with new proposed APIs and extension authors can try them out. As always we are keen on your feedback. This is what you have to do to try out a proposed API:

  • You must use Insiders because proposed APIs change frequently.
  • You must have this line in the package.json file of your extension: "enableProposedApi": true.
  • Copy the latest version of the vscode.proposed.d.ts file into your project.

Note that you cannot publish an extension that uses a proposed API. We may likely make breaking changes in the next release and we never want to break existing extensions.

SCM: Selected source controls

In order for extensions to know which source control instances have been selected by the user for visibility in the UI, SourceControl instances now have a selected property as well as a onDidChangeSelection event which represent that state.

export interface SourceControl {
  /**
   * Whether the source control is selected.
   */
  readonly selected: boolean;

  /**
   * An event signaling when the selection state changes.
   */
  readonly onDidChangeSelection: Event<boolean>;
}

Comment providers

We are introducing the concept of comments this iteration, which allow extensions to create and manage conversations within editors and a new Comments panel. This enables extensions to support code review scenarios.

Comments are organized into threads and associated with a particular document.

export enum CommentThreadCollapsibleState {
  Collapsed = 0,
  Expanded = 1
}

interface CommentThread {
  threadId: string;
  resource: Uri;
  range: Range;
  comments: Comment[];
  collapsibleState?: CommentThreadCollapsibleState;
}

interface Comment {
  commentId: string;
  body: MarkdownString;
  userName: string;
  gravatar: string;
  command?: Command;
}

To display comments, an extension must register a DocumentCommentProvider or WorkspaceCommentProvider.

export interface CommentThreadChangedEvent {
  readonly added: CommentThread[];
  readonly removed: CommentThread[];
  readonly changed: CommentThread[];
}

interface CommentInfo {
  threads: CommentThread[];
  commentingRanges?: Range[];
}

interface DocumentCommentProvider {
  provideDocumentComments(
    document: TextDocument,
    token: CancellationToken
  ): Promise<CommentInfo>;
  createNewCommentThread(
    document: TextDocument,
    range: Range,
    text: string,
    token: CancellationToken
  ): Promise<CommentThread>;
  replyToCommentThread(
    document: TextDocument,
    range: Range,
    commentThread: CommentThread,
    text: string,
    token: CancellationToken
  ): Promise<CommentThread>;
  onDidChangeCommentThreads: Event<CommentThreadChangedEvent>;
}

interface WorkspaceCommentProvider {
  provideWorkspaceComments(token: CancellationToken): Promise<CommentThread[]>;
  onDidChangeCommentThreads: Event<CommentThreadChangedEvent>;
}

Using the DocumentCommentProvider, comments can be returned for open documents. When providing comments, the extension specifies both the current threads on the document, and what range of the document supports adding new comments. Comments can be added or replied to from within the document.

A comment within an editor

When a WorkspaceCommentProvider is first registered, the CommentsPanel becomes visible and shows all comments provided to it. Comments are grouped by comment thread and resource. When a comment is selected in the panel, the comments command is run, so the extension determines the behavior.

Comments panel

Preview Features

Preview features are not ready for release but are functional enough to use. We welcome your early feedback while they are under development.

Electron 3.0 exploration

During this milestone, we explored bundling Electron 3.0.0 into VS Code. This is a major Electron release and comes with Chrome 66 and Node.js 10.x (a major leap forward compared to our current version that has Chrome 61 and Node.js 8.x). We plan to push out the update to our Insiders users in the near future to gather additional feedback. If you are interested in helping out, make sure to install VS Code Insiders.

Engineering

Extensions and webpack

We are now using webpack to bundle extensions. It unlocks two achievements: (1) reduce the startup time for extensions because there are fewer files to load and less source to parse and (2) reduce the install time because fewer files need to be extracted and written to disk. So far, we've reduced the bundle size by ~4000 files!

Performance canary

We have added a test harness to ensure that our startup performance isn't regressing. There is a new script that can be deployed to dedicated machines to test the performance of Insider builds. The script simply installs the latest build and makes sure that it starts within a time limit. For now, we started with Windows because performance is often affected by updates to anti-virus software but the plan is to test on all platforms we support.

IPC stack improvements

We've improved our homegrown IPC stack to support byte buffer messages between processes. This enables certain scenarios such as sending binary data between our different processes without overhead as well as allowing us to optimize IPC for performance.

Notable Fixes

  • 6363: Alternate data streams are removed when saving
  • 25919: New command to force open a new window as native tab
  • 49021: Do not reset WSL permissions metadata on save
  • 49403: Auto attach causing issues when debugging in integrated terminal
  • 55025: Allow to continue debug when extension host restarts
  • 56084: Open Editors: revisit order of groups to be based on visual order
  • 56691: Error launching vscode when a # exists in the path
  • 57018: Stopping/Restarting debugger fails to stop babel-node

Thank You

Last but certainly not least, a big Thank You! to the following folks that helped to make VS Code even better:

Contributions to vscode:

Contributions to vscode-vsce:

Contributions to vscode-eslint:

Contributions to language-server-protocol:

Contributions to vscode-languageserver-node:

Contributions to debug-adapter-protocol:

Contributions to vscode-css-languageservice:

Contributions to vscode-html-languageservice:

Contributions to vscode-json-languageservice:

Contributions to node-jsonc-parser:

Contributions to vscode-generator-code:

Contributions to localization:

There are almost 1200 members in the Transifex VS Code project team with about 100 active contributors every month. We appreciate your contributions, either by providing new translations, voting on translations, or suggesting process improvements.

Here is a snapshot of contributors for this release. For details about the project including the contributor name list, visit the project site at https://aka.ms/vscodeloc.

  • Bulgarian: Любомир Василев.
  • Croatian: Nikša Mihaica.
  • Danish: Christoffer Bech.
  • English (United Kingdom): Matthew John Cheetham, Swotboy2000.
  • Finnish: Petri Niinimäki, Feetu Nyrhinen, Jussi Palo.
  • French: Antoine Griffard, Guillaume Bauer, Smrman.
  • German: Carsten Siemens, Carsten Kneip, Jonas Droste, Markus Hatvan, Christian Studer, Peter Schneider, Jonas Keller, thefreshman89.
  • Hungarian: Tar Dániel, Bence László.
  • Chinese Simplified: Joel Yang, 子实 王, Wang Dongcheng, pluwen, DongWei, Henry Chu, aimin guo, Chris Pan 潘冬冬, 子昂 马.
  • Chinese Traditional: Duran Hsieh, Winnie Lin, Poy Chang, Alan Tsai.
  • Indonesian: Wildan Mubarok, G-RiNe Project.
  • Italian: Luca Bruni, Alessandro Alpi, Andrea Dottor, Emanuele Curati, Riccardo Cappello, Gianluca Acerbis, Emilie Rollandin, Marco Dal Pino, Luigi Bruno, Lorthirk, Aldo Donetti.
  • Japanese: Shunya Tajima, Satoshi Kajiura, Yuichi Nukiyama, Hiroyuki Mori, yoshioms.
  • Korean: Kyunghee Ko, PaulNara, smallsnail, Kwangjin Hwang.
  • Lithuanian: Tomas Cimermonas.
  • Polish: Artur, hawkeye116477, Patryk Brejdak, Mateusz Gazdziak, Robert Skórski, Sebastian Baran.
  • Portuguese (Brazil): Roberto Fonseca, Bruno Sonnino, Marcelo Fernandes, Lucas Miranda, João Mesquita, Danilo Dantas, Rodrigo Crespi, Arthur Bruel, Thiago Moreira de Souza Arrais, Otacilio Saraiva Maia Neto, Loiane Groner, Fabio Correia.
  • Portuguese (Portugal): Richard Nunes, Daniel Correia, Tiago Costa.
  • Romanian: Bogdan Mateescu, Szauka.
  • Russian: Roman Slauta, Ivan Kuzmenko.
  • Spanish: Alejandro Medina, José M. Aguilar, Roberto Fonseca, Javier Moreno, Andy Gonzalez, Alberto Poblacion, Nancy Todd, Antonio Sanmartín.
  • Telugu: Hari Jujjavarapu, Sridhar L.