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What's New in Visual Studio Code 1.27 (August Update)
The latest monthly update of the lightweight, cross-platform and open source Visual Studio Code editor features a number of UI, navigation and other improvements.
Here are the highlights:
- Settings editor: A new Settings editor UI helps discover, search and modify VS Code settings. While it has been in the works for months, it's now the default GUI for editing settings. It has been cleaned up and tweaked and new functionality has been added, such as search results now providing relevant Marketplace extensions. The previous JSON editor can still be accessed if developers prefer to use it.
- Custom menu bar: Fully themable title and menu bars on Windows and Linux have an improved look and feel, designed to boost usability. Bars and menu themes are consistent throughout the editor, and navigation and accessibility have been boosted.
- Breadcrumbs improvements: Furthering navigation functionality, symbols are now highlighted when navigating with breadcrumbs. Also, bugs have been fixed, and other tweaks have been made, such making breadcrumbs work better with themes.
- New Terminal menu: The new iteration sports a combined menu for creating terminals and managing tasks, and the Tasks menu was renamed to Terminal, with more entries for the Integrated Terminal being made available.
- Platform-specific keyboard shortcuts: The same keybindings.json file can now be shared across across different OSs via enabling keyboard shortcuts for specific OSs using isLinux, isMac and isWindows within a keybinding's when clause.
- CSS @import path completion: Path suggestions can be imported while developers type in CSS, SCSS and Less. "Path completion for CSS, SCSS and Less @import is now available," Microsoft said. "SCSS partial @import is handled as well."
- JSON conditional evaluation: Support has been added for if, then and else schema keywords, along with other functionality enabled through the built-in JSON language extension's added support for the new JSON Schema Draft-07.
- Built-in Loaded Scripts view: The Loaded Scripts Explorer in the Debug view, which was contributed by the Node.js debug extension and unavailable to other debuggers, is now available for debug extensions. The Loaded Scripts view is now available 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," Microsoft said.
Other improvements have been made to extension authoring, proposed extension APIs are available for trying out, and not-ready-for-release preview features can be put through their paces, including an exploration of bundling in Electron 3.0.
All of the above and much more are detailed in an announcement blog post.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.