🚀 Get in VS Code!

May 2020 (version 1.46)

Update 1.46.1: The update addresses these issues.

Downloads: Windows: x64 Arm64 | Mac: Intel | Linux: deb rpm tarball snap

Welcome to the May 2020 release of Visual Studio Code.

If you'd like to read these release notes online, go to Updates on code.visualstudio.com.

Accessibility

This milestone we again received helpful feedback from our community, which let us identify and tackle many accessibility issues.

  • The Status bar now supports keyboard navigation. When focus is in the Status bar via Focus Next Part (F6), arrow navigation moves between Status bar entries.
  • To make it easier to start and end selection using the keyboard, there are four new commands:
    • Set Selection Anchor (⌘K ⌘B (Windows, Linux Ctrl+K Ctrl+B))
    • Select From Anchor to Cursor (⌘K ⌘K (Windows, Linux Ctrl+K Ctrl+K))
    • Cancel Selection Anchor (Escape)
    • Go to Selection Anchor
  • Activity bar entries now have a tab role and set the appropriate aria-expanded state.
  • Aria labels of editors now properly convey the following editor states: pinned, preview, and readonly.

Workbench

Flexible layout

For several iterations, we have announced progress on making our layout more flexible. With this release, that set of features are now ready for general use. Below is an overview of these features.

Moving views between Side Bar and Panel

Perhaps you would prefer a view from the Side Bar to be located in the Panel or vice versa. To do this, you can now drag a view by its header or an entire group by its icon or title from its current placement and move it to the desired location. From the keyboard, the commands View: Move View (workbench.action.moveView) and View: Move Focused View (workbench.action.moveFocusedView) can be used.

Below is a demonstration of dragging Search to the Panel and Problems into the Side Bar.

Moving Views Between Side Bar and Panel

Dragging Search to the Panel and Problems into the Activity Bar

Theme: GitHub Light

Earlier there was a setting for moving the Search view from the Side Bar to the Panel and now that setting is obsolete since drag and drop can be used instead.

Grouping views

You might also want to group some views together that come from different extensions or you feel the default groups of built-in views aren't quite right for you. You can both move views into existing groups or create new groups for a select set of views. This works across the Side Bar and Panel just as before. Below are a couple of examples of this.

Moving Timeline from Explorer to Source Control

Dragging the Timeline view from Explorer to Source Control

Side By Side Debug Console and Watch View

Dragging the Watch view from the Run Side Bar to be next to the Debug Console in Panel

Custom History Group

Creating a custom history group in the Side Bar and Panel with Timeline and GitLens

Theme: GitHub Light

Resetting view Locations

Views and groups of views can be reset to their default locations via their context menus. When a view has been moved from its default location, there will be an entry Reset Location to move it back to its home. There are also commands View: Reset Focused View Location (workbench.action.resetFocusedViewLocation) and View: Reset View Locations (workbench.action.resetViewLocations) for resetting all views and groups back to their default locations.

For extension authors contributing views or view containers

When views are moved around the workbench, they sometimes need to be presented differently, either with an icon or extra context if they aren't in their default location. When contributing a view, authors may now provide an icon property and a contextualTitle. If not provided, these will default to the icon and title of the view container to which they are contributed.

Lastly, extension authors can now start contributing view containers directly to the panel as opposed to activitybar as outlined in the Tree view extension guide.

Pin tabs

You can now pin tabs either from the context menu or using the new command workbench.action.pinEditor (⌘K ⇧Enter (Windows, Linux Ctrl+K Shift+Enter)).

Pin Tabs

Theme: GitHub Light

Pinned tabs have a number of useful features to help mark files that are important to you:

  • Pinned tabs always appear first before non-pinned tabs.
  • They do not scroll out of view if you have many tabs opened.
  • They do not close when using commands such as Close Others.
  • They do not close even if you exceed a set limit on the number of opened editors.

You can also drag and drop tabs in and out to change the pinned state.

Pinned tabs visually shrink to the size of an icon (or will show the first letter of the filename if icons are disabled) to save space. If you want to see the dirty indicator with pinned tabs, you can set workbench.editor.highlightModifiedTabs: true.

Note: We are still thinking about other ways to present pinned tabs. If you have an opinion, feel free to share your ideas in the existing issues for showing a secondary tab bar or having a setting to show more context for pinned tabs.

Search Editor

There are several new options for configuring how Search Editors are created:

  • search.searchEditor.defaultNumberOfContextLines - Configure how many context lines a Search Editor shows by default.
  • search.searchEditor.reusePriorSearchConfiguration - Reuse the last active Search Editor's configuration when creating a new Search Editor.
  • Support for passing Search Editor configuration variables in keybinding arguments (parameter details).

Explorer auto reveal focus without forcing a scroll

There is a new option focusNoScroll for the explorer.autoReveal setting. When using this option, the Explorer will automatically select files when opening them but will not scroll to reveal them in the Explorer view.

Smooth scrolling for lists and trees

Enabling the workbench.list.smoothScrolling setting will make scrolling in lists and trees much smoother with hardware that lacks smooth scrolling (for example, discrete mouse wheel on Windows).

Smooth scrolling

Sash size configuration

You can now use the workbench.sash.size setting to configure the feedback area size in pixels of the dragging area in between views/editors. Set it to a larger value if you feel it's hard to resize views using the mouse.

Screencast mode font size

The new screencastMode.fontSize setting lets you configure the font size in pixels that is being used in screencast mode.

Trusted link protection

VS Code will now allow directly opening URL links to any GitHub remotes in your workspace. Additionally, if you have signed in with GitHub, all links to pages under your GitHub profile will be trusted.

Editor

Cross file Undo for closed files

It is now possible to Undo across files, even if the files have been closed in the meantime. The edited files will be reopened and a cross-file operation, such as a rename symbol, will be undone in all affected files.

Unusual line terminators

VS Code currently recognizes CR (Carriage Return), LF (Line Feed), and CRLF as line terminators. Some programming languages have different definitions for what constitutes a line terminator. This varies across languages, for example LS (Line Separator) and PS (Paragraph Separator) are line terminators in C# and JavaScript, but not in HTML, PHP, or Java. These line ending differences can cause problems when VS Code communicates with a language server, since various concepts are communicated between VS Code and the language server using (line;char) coordinates. If there are different definitions of a line terminator, it can result in different mappings of lines and locations in the file.

When opening a file, VS Code will now check if LS or PS are present in the opened file, and will prompt and ask for permission to remove these characters. These unusual line terminators are rare in practice and are most likely inserted in source code by accident, via copy-pasting.

Integrated Terminal

Improved link support

The Integrated Terminal link preview from last month has replaced the old implementation. The new links implementation now enables:

  • Improved web and file:// link detection, by using the editor's link detection.
  • Folder link support, either opening the folder in the Explorer or opening a new VS Code window.
  • Different link actions for different link types, falling back to "word" links that search the workspace (based on the terminal.integrated.wordSeparators setting).
  • Similar link highlighting and hover experience to the editor.

Terminal with various links

Theme: Topaz (Dim)

Tasks

Continuing with the recent tasks performance improvements, Run Build Task will no longer always ask extensions for their tasks. If you have a default build task configured in your folder's tasks.json, Run Build Task will only try to resolve that task, instead of finding all tasks from all extensions before running the default build task.

Source Control

Open in Terminal

You can now open a repository in a terminal from the context menu in the Source Control view.

Open in terminal from Source Control view

Add remote from GitHub

You can now add a GitHub repository as a remote to your local repositories using the Git: Add Remote... command.

Use Add Remote Command

Generate .gitignore when publishing to GitHub

It's now possible to generate a .gitignore file when publishing a workspace to GitHub. When publishing a workspace to GitHub, you are prompted to select which files to include in the repository and those files not included will be added to a .gitignore file.

Select which files to include in the repository

Input field font family

You can now customize the font family used in the Source Control input field using the Scm: Input Font Family setting. The setting supports the following values:

  • default - Workbench user interface font family.
  • editor - Font family specified in the Editor: Font Family setting.
  • font family name - The name of the font family to be used in the input field (for example, Cascadia Code).

Abort in progress rebase

You can now abort in progress rebase operations using the Git: Abort Rebase command.

Debugging

Automatic debug configurations improvements

This milestone we have improved the experience for automatic debug configurations:

  • Last milestone, we introduced a feature so that extension authors can analyze the current project and offer debug configurations automatically. These debug configurations are dynamically created and so they do not show up in the launch.json configuration file. This is nice as long as they work out of the box, but sometimes you may need to modify the configuration, for instance to add an additional argument. There is now an option to save an automatic debug configuration into a launch.json, in order to open it up for editing. To do this, use the gear button at the end of the automatic debug configuration in the Debug: Select and Start Debugging Quick Pick:

    Selecting Edit automatic debug configuration in launch

  • It is now possible to show all automatic debug configurations from the Run and Debug start view.

    Automatic debug configs in start view

  • The Debug dropdown now remembers the previously chosen automatic debug configuration.

Step Into Targets

Debugging into a statement with many nested function calls can be painful because you might have to step through functions you are not really interested in. To improve this scenario, the Debug Adapter Protocol has supported the "Step Into Target" feature that displays UI for directly stepping into the function you are interested in.

In this milestone, VS Code has started to use this feature. When debugging has stopped on a statement, the context menu shows a new action Step Into Targets. This action presents a list of all targets (typically functions) that are available at the current stack frame. Selecting one of them will step into that target.

Note that every stack frame can have its own set of targets. So the result of the Step Into Targets actions depends on the currently selected frame in the CALL STACK view.

Step into targets in context menu

For now, only the Mock Debug extension has (fake) Step Into Target support, but soon other debug extensions will follow - such as the Julia debugger.

Languages

TypeScript 3.9

VS Code now includes TypeScript 3.9.4. This major TS update brings some new tooling features, performance improvements, and a number of bug fixes. You can read more about TS 3.9 on the TypeScript blog.

CommonJS auto imports

If VS Code detects that you are working in a CommonJS style JavaScript module, auto imports will now use require instead of import.

Auto imports using 'require' in a JS file

Refactorings preserve newlines

Refactorings for JavaScript and TypeScript, such as Extract to method and Move to new file, now try to preserve the original formatting of the refactored source code. This includes any newlines present in the selection:

The 'extract method' refactoring preserving newlines

Add all missing imports source action

VS Code has long supported a Quick Fix that adds all missing imports in a JavaScript or TypeScript file. This iteration, we introduced a new Add all missing imports source action that lets you trigger this from anywhere in a file.

Adding imports using a source action

This also allows you to set up a keybinding for Add all missing imports:

{
  "key": "ctrl+shift+i",
  "command": "editor.action.sourceAction",
  "args": {
    "kind": "source.addMissingImports",
    "apply": "first"
  }
}

Or even enable Add all missing imports on save:

"editor.codeActionsOnSave": [
    "source.addMissingImports"
]

JS/TS Go to Symbol in workspace includes all opened projects

By default, workspace symbol search for JavaScript and TypeScript now searches all opened jsconfig and tsconfig projects. It previously only included search results from the project the focused file belonged to.

This behavior is controlled by the typescript.workspaceSymbols.scope setting and requires TS 3.9+. To revert to the previous behavior and only search the current project, set "typescript.workspaceSymbols.scope": "currentProject"

Add missing import Quick Fixes can now be marked preferred

The Adding missing import Quick Fix for JavaScript and TypeScript can now be marked as the preferred fix for an error. This lets you add the missing import with a single keypress using ⌥⌘. (Windows, Linux Shift+Alt+.).

Note that Adding missing import will only be marked as the preferred fix if there is a single valid import. If there are multiple potential imports in your projects, you still need to use the normal Code Actions menu to select which import to use. Also, to enable Add missing import Quick Fixes in JavaScript, you must enable type checking.

JSON offline mode

A new setting json.schemaDownload.enable lets you control whether the JSON extension is allowed to fetch JSON schemas from http and https.

A warning triangle in the Status bar will appear when the current editor would like to use schemas that cannot be downloaded. Schema-based features like validation, code completion, and hovers will then be limited.

JSON warning triangle

Browser support

Debugging stopped indicator in tab title

When debugging an extension in the browser, the debugged extension shows up in a new browser tab that deactivates (hides) the debugger tab. When the debuggee stops for some reason, for example, hits a breakpoint, we are not able to activate the debugger tab (because browsers don't provide an API for this). This makes it almost impossible to discover that the debugged extension has stopped.

To alleviate this problem, we now update the tab title to include a red circle indicator 🔴 (resembling a breakpoint). As soon as the debugger tab is activated, the red dot is removed.

Debuggee stopped indicator in web view

Running VS Code from the Integrated Terminal

When you open an Integrated Terminal in VS Code running in the browser, you can type code to get access to several useful commands that all work in the browser.

Terminal Remote

In this iteration, we expanded support for many options:

  • --goto to open a file on a specific line
  • --diff to compare two files
  • --wait to let a program wait for files closing
  • --add to add a folder to the current workspace

In GitHub Codespaces, for example, this enables you to use the browser-based VS Code as an editor for Git:

VS Code Git Editor in Browser

Theme: GitHub Light

File/folder upload

VS Code lets you drop files into the File Explorer to upload them. In this iteration, we improved this feature to allow you to drop folders to upload them, including all child folders and files. Since this can be a long running operation, you will see progress reported in the Status bar and you can cancel the operation if needed.

Drag files into File Explorer

Accounts management

In previous releases, we introduced a preview of a new accounts management UI alongside the preview of the Settings Sync feature. Now, this UI will show up by default. Extensions using the new proposed Authentication Provider API can surface requests to sign in here, and you can view your accounts and manage extension access. There are currently a limited number of extensions using this API, we will work on increasing adoption once the API is stable.

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.

Settings Sync

We have been working the last couple of months to support synchronizing VS Code preferences across machines and this feature is available for preview on the Insiders release.

In this milestone, we enhanced support for administering and diagnosing Settings Sync.

Synced Machines view

We added the Synced Machines view to show the list of machines synchronizing your VS Code preferences. A default name is provided based on the type of VS Code (Insiders or Stable) and platform you are using, but you can always update the name using the edit action available on the machine entry in the view.

Synced Machines view

Theme: GitHub Sharp with Customizations

You can open this view using Preferences Sync: Show Synced Data command from the Command Palette.

Synced Data view

We added following enhancements to the Synced Data view.

  • You can now see the machine from which data is being synced.
  • You can restore to a specific state using the Restore action available on the data entry in the view.
  • You can reset data on the cloud using the Reset Synced Data action available under More Action (...) button in the view header.

Synced Data view

Theme: GitHub Sharp with Customizations

We now provide more assistance while turning on sync by checking if you are about to sync with data from a different machine and allow you to take appropriate action.

  • Replace Local - Replace your data on the current machine with the synced data from the cloud.
  • Merge - Merge your data on the current machine with the synced data from the cloud.
  • Show Synced Data - Open Synced Data view to see the synced data from the cloud.

Replace or Merge pop-up

New JavaScript debugger

This month we continued making progress on our new JavaScript debugger. Since mid-May, it has become the default debugger on Insiders, and is included (but not enabled by default) on VS Code Stable in this release. You can start using it with your existing launch configurations by enabling the debug.javascript.usePreview setting.

Progress this month was primarily focused on polishing and stabilizing existing functionality:

  • Multi-tab support for browser debugging: You can now attach to multiple tabs when running browsers or webviews. By default, js-debug attaches to all tabs that match the urlFilter. When attaching to browsers, you can set "targetSelection": "pick" in your launch configuration to connect to a single tab as in the previous debugger.
  • Improved tab disambiguation: The debug session names more accurately disambiguate multiple tabs. Additionally, we added a Focus Tab action in the context menu for the debug session in the Call Stack view, which you can use to make sure you're looking at the right page.
  • Option to auto-expand getters: Matching the behavior of Chrome, property getters are not evaluated by default when shown in the Variables view or the Debug Console. You can now configure this behavior by setting the debug.javascript.autoExpandGetters option.
  • Performance improvements for types of webpack bundles: Certain types of webpack bundles, those built with eval sourcemaps, ran slowly under js-debug. They no longer do so.

TS 4.0 nightly build support

VS Code 1.46 includes preview support for TypeScript 4.0 nightly builds. The nightly build includes support for some new tooling features that we are actively working on, such as more flexible selections for refactoring.

You can try TypeScript 4.0 nightly builds today by installing the TypeScript Nightly extension. Please share feedback and let us know if you run into any bugs with the TypeScript 4.0.

Contributions to extensions

Notebooks

Quick outline

Notebook extensions, such as GitHub Issue Notebooks, now support quick outline. Press kb('workbench.action.gotoSymbol'), or use the Go to Symbol in Editor command, and see a preview of all Markdown and code cells of the current notebook.

Notebook quick outline preview list

Theme: GitHub Theme

Error and symbol navigation

We have improved how F8 and Find All References work. All code navigation gestures should feel as natural as they to do outside of Notebooks. For instance, the Problems view will now show all errors of all cells grouped by the Notebook, not by cell anymore:

Problems panel with errors grouped by notebook

Theme: GitHub Theme

Join/Split cells

We introduced two sets of commands for you to quickly join cells or split cells into smaller fragments:

Running Join and Split Notebook cells commands

Theme: GitHub Dark Theme

Retained Notebook

Pinned or dirty Notebook editors are now persistent in the workspace, so users won't lose the working state in the Notebook if the Notebook is moved to the background or moved to another editor group.

Persisted Notebook

Theme: GitHub Dark Theme

Unified Undo/Redo stack

Users operations of manipulating Notebook cells or modifying Notebook cell content are now tracked in the same Undo/Redo stack.

Show tracking of Unified Undo/Redo stack

Theme: GitHub Dark Theme

GitHub Pull Requests and Issues

Work continues on the GitHub Pull Requests and Issues extension, which allows you to work on, create, and manage pull requests and issues. Some updates for this release include:

  • Improved labels in issue hovers.
  • Issue and user suggestions now only trigger in comments and plaintext.
  • The new issue editor enables you to set assignees and labels.

To learn about all the new features and updates, you can see the full changelog for the 0.17.0 release of the extension.

Remote Development

Work continues on the Remote Development extensions, which allow you to use a container, remote machine, or the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) as a full-featured development environment.

New features in 1.46 include:

  • Dev Containers: Support for GPG forwarding.
  • Dev Containers: Support for inspecting a Docker volume.
  • Dev Containers: New devcontainer.json command properties.

You can learn about new extension features and bug fixes in the Remote Development release notes.

Hex Editor

With the custom editor API finalized with support for binary editors, we have developed a hex editor extension to provide a native hex editing experience.

Hex Editor

This extension is still under development and currently only supports opening and navigating files as hex. We will continue to work on the navigational experience and then move on to support editing. You can try out the extension and provide feedback or file issues against the vscode-hexeditor repository.

Extension authoring

File path casing

We have fixed a couple of bugs with how VS Code handles paths and URIs on case-insensitive file systems. Before this release, paths with different casing would not open the same document but separate, disconnected documents. That behavior often caused confusion and sometimes data loss.

However, in fixing these bugs, the behavior of the openTextDocument function has changed. The function can now return a document with a URI with different casing than the URI that was passed in. This means extensions should use TextDocument#uri as the source of truth, not the URI that they request it with.

The sample below illustrates the new behavior:

// case-insensitive file system

const uriA = vscode.Uri.file('/foo/bar.code');
const docA = await vscode.workspace.openTextDocument(uriA);

const uriB = vscode.Uri.file('/foo/BAR.code');
const docB = await vscode.workspace.openTextDocument(uriB);

assert.ok(docA === docB); // same document
assert.ok(docB.uri.toString() === uriA.toString()); // uriA is used, NOT uriB
assert.ok(docB.uri.toString() !== uriB.toString());

New Debug Console theme colors

There are new colors for styling the Debug Console view:

  • debugConsole.infoForeground: Foreground color for info messages in Debug Console
  • debugConsole.warningForeground: Foreground color for warning messages in Debug Console
  • debugConsole.errorForeground: Foreground color for error messages in Debug Console
  • debugConsole.sourceForeground: Foreground color for source filenames in Debug Console
  • debugConsoleInputIcon.foreground: Foreground color for Debug Console input marker icon

New input theme colors

We also have new color theme option for inputs. You can set the foreground color for active input options via inputOption.activeForeground. These appear in the Search view and Find widget (editor, terminal, debug console).

Input option foreground color

Theme: GitHub Dark Theme

New codicon icons

We've added the following new icons to our codicon library:

  • server-process
  • server-environment
  • record
  • pass
  • stop-circle
  • play-circle

New available icons

Theme: GitHub Dark Theme

Providers use generic types

Our vscode.d.ts typings now makes all two phase providers—ones that have separate 'provide' and 'resolve' methods—generic. The goal was to make it clearer that the results from the 'provide' call are passed back into the 'resolve' call.

For example, here is the new generic definition of DocumentLinkProvider:

export interface DocumentLinkProvider<T = DocumentLink> {
  provideDocumentLinks(
    document: TextDocument,
    token: CancellationToken
  ): ProviderResult<T[]>;

  resolveDocumentLink?(link: T, token: CancellationToken): ProviderResult<T>;
}

All providers have a default generic argument so this change should not cause any errors with your existing extension. If you were previously using casts or type checks while implementing 'resolve', consider updating your code to use a generic provider instead:

class MyDocLinkProvider implements DocumentLinkProvider<MyDocumentLink> {

  provideDocumentLinks(document: TextDocument, token: CancellationToken): MyDocumentLink[] { ... }

  resolveDocumentLink(link: MyDocumentLink, token: CancellationToken): MyDocumentLink { ... }
}

Writing theme-specific CSS in webviews

The body element of webviews has a new data attribute called vscode-theme-name that stores the full name of the currently active theme. This lets you write theme-specific CSS in webviews:

body[data-vscode-theme-name="One Dark Pro"] {
    background: hotpink;
}

Keep in mind that given the number of themes that are available for VS Code, you should only write theme-specific CSS in exceptional cases. Normal webviews should instead use the .vscode-light and .vscode-dark class names along with the VS Code CSS variables to write CSS that adapts to whatever theme the user selects.

Custom Binary Editors

We've finalized the API for custom binary editors. The custom editor API lets extensions create custom webview-based editors that either replace VS Code's default text editor or can be switched to by users. This can be used for previewing asset files, such as images or 3D models, directly within VS Code, or for building more specialized editing interfaces for specific file types. With the new binary custom editor API, you can now build read/write editors for non-text based file formats as well.

A custom editor for binary files

The custom editor extension guide covers the API in much more detail. Also check out the custom editor extension sample, which includes examples custom editors for both text and binary file formats.

Relaxed resolveCompletionItem

The CompletionItemProvider#resolveCompletionItem function allows providers to lazily enrich completions with more data. This "lazy" data must be optional and must not change the insert behavior of completions. Extensions can still fill in additionalTextEdits and if additional edits arrive after a completion has been inserted, the editor will still attempt to apply them. Note that this only applies to additional edits, not to the main edit (insertText) which must not change once provided.

onStartupFinished activation event

We now have a new activation event, similar to the already existing * activation event. The new onStartupFinished activation event should be used when an extension wishes to be activated sometime soon after VS Code startup, but not as part of the startup.

Environment variable collection

The ExtensionContext.EnvironmentVariableCollection API is now stable and allows extensions to contribute to terminal environments.

const collection = context.environmentVariableCollection;
const separator = process.platform === 'win32' ? ';' : ':';
collection.prepend('PATH', `/foo${separator}`);
collection.replace('JAVA_HOME', '/bar');

These collections are extension and workspace-specific and VS Code handles how conflicts between multiple extensions are dealt with. They are persisted across window reloads such that terminals created immediately after the window is loaded do not block on the extension host launching but instead use the last known version. These persisted collections are removed by disposing of the collection or when the extension is uninstalled.

When collections change, an indicator will appear on the terminal. Whether this indicator shows for any active change or just for "stale" terminals is defined by the terminal.integrated.environmentChangesIndicator setting. This API is now also used by the built-in Git extension to let VS Code be an authentication provider.

Debug Adapter Protocol

New instruction breakpoints

There is a new "instruction" breakpoint type, which makes it possible to break on an instruction at a memory address. Memory addresses are specified in symbolic form that is optionally available from evaluate, variables, stackTrace, and gotoTargets requests. A corresponding capability supportsInstructionBreakpoints indicates whether a debug adapter supports instruction breakpoints.

Support for "stepping granularity"

A new optional granularity argument has been added to the stepping requests next, stepIn, stepOut, stepBack to control whether the request steps a "statement", a "line", or an "instruction". A corresponding capability supportsSteppingGranularity indicates whether a debug adapter supports the feature.

Proposed extension APIs

Every milestone comes with new proposed APIs and extension authors can try them out. As always, we want 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's source location.

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

Git extension API

The built-in Git extension offers an API for extensions to use. The existing API exposed a way to get log results for a Repository. The updated API will now let log be constrained by a path.

export interface LogOptions {
  readonly maxEntries?: number;
  readonly path?: string;
}
export interface Repository {
  log(options?: LogOptions): Promise<Commit[]>;
}

There is also now a Git extension API to getBranches based on a BranchQuery:

export interface BranchQuery {
  readonly remote?: boolean;
  readonly contains?: string;
}
export interface Repository {
  getBranches(query: BranchQuery): Promise<Ref[]>;
}

AccessibilityInformation

We have added AccessibilityInformation to the TreeItem, StatusBarItem, and TimelineItem elements to support screen readers. AccessibilityInformation contains a label and a role. The label is read by screen readers and the role describes the accessibility characteristics of the element.

Engineering

Windows ARM64 Insiders

There are new official Insider builds for Windows for ARM 64-bit, available on the Insiders download page.

These builds work with the Microsoft Surface Pro X, so give it a try and let us know what you think.

Windows ARM64

--crash-reporter-directory argument for diagnosing issues

A new command-line argument --crash-reporter-directory allows you to pass a local folder where you'd like to save crash reports. This even works for crashes in the extension host and can be used whenever VS Code is crashing and you want to report an issue.

Preload Scripts

We have added Electron preload scripts to VS Code for exposing certain Electron APIs to the window. This is one of the first steps towards a fully sandboxed window. Progress is outlined in issue #92164.

Extension samples now use ESLint

Our extension samples have all been updated to use ESLint for linting instead of the now deprecated TSLint. If your extension is still using TSLint, you can review the TSLint to ESLint Migration guide and our newly updated extension samples to see how to migrate to ESLint.

GitHub Triage Extension

We created an extension for chromium-based browsers to help us with issue triaging on GitHub by providing a single fuzzy-filterable menu of assignees, labels, milestones, and various special comments we use to trigger our triaging GitHub Actions. We have open sourced the code on GitHub.

Screenshot of Extension

Documentation and extensions

Visual Studio Code at Build

The VS Code team presented at the Microsoft Build 2020 conference and you can find an overview of the VS Code sessions and online talks in this VS Code at Build blog post.

Several talks by VS Code team members:

Azure extensions

There are several new extensions for working with and deploying Azure assets directly from within VS Code.

  • Azure Static Web Apps - Create and manage Azure Static Web Apps directly from VS Code.
  • Azure Databases - Create, browse, and update globally distributed, multi-model databases in Azure.

Azure Databases extension

New commands

Key Command Command ID
⌘K ⇧Enter (Windows, Linux Ctrl+K Shift+Enter) Pin Editor workbench.action.pinEditor
⌘K ⇧Enter (Windows, Linux Ctrl+K Shift+Enter) Unpin Editor workbench.action.unpinEditor

Notable fixes

  • 10144: Use system-ui as font on Linux
  • 63068: macOS dock icon is minuscule
  • 69163: Reveal Active File in Side Bar is throwing an exception
  • 95367: DAP "evaluate" request issued for invalid frameId
  • 95856: Go To Line should include "filename.extension:line number" format
  • 96713: Stopping a session from call stack actions view always goes to the active session
  • 96914: Typing is laggy when outline is visible
  • 96987: Orca does not read the line number in the breakpoint view
  • 97444: Copying a long value from debug watch results in pasting partial value
  • 97471: Debug hover is too narrow and horizontal scrolling useless
  • 97731: VS code freezes when typing and scrolling
  • 96643: Tasks (and TaskExecutions) are not === in the onDid(Start|End)Task callbacks

Thank you

Last but certainly not least, a big Thank You to the following people who contributed this month to VS Code:

Contributions to our issue tracking:

Contributions to vscode:

Contributions to language-server-protocol:

Contributions to vscode-generator-code:

Contributions to vscode-vsce:

Contributions to debug-adapter-protocol:

Contributions to vscode-js-debug:

Contributions to localization:

We have keenly listened to your feedback over the past year, and decided it was time to provide a more reliable and interactive platform, where you can contribute to VS Code localization development. With this in mind, we officially decommissioned the Microsoft Localization Community Platform (MLCP) in the first week of April, with the intent of continuing the Microsoft Community Localization Program on an alternative platform for open-source localization projects.

Stay tuned in the upcoming weeks for an announcement on our Wiki page about the new community platform. You can also visit the FAQ page for answers about this platform transition.