News
What's New in the Visual Studio Code February 2019 Release
Microsoft shipped the February 2019 update of its open source, cross-platform Visual Studio Code editor with a bevy of improvements and fixes for a wide range of functionality.
Here's a summary of the highlights in the new VS Code 1.32 release as described by the company:
- Preview and apply color themes: Developers can now preview and apply color and file icon themes immediately after installing an extension that contributes them, without reloading.
- Keyboard shortcuts editor improvements: Developers can now edit the when clause of a keybinding in the Keyboard Shortcuts editor. Microsoft removed the link that opens the keybindings.json file from the Keyboard Shortcuts editor in favor of the {} button on the right of the editor title bar.
- Problems panel hover commands: Apply Quick Fixes or open a Peek window directly from hovers:
- A command bar with Quick Fix and Peek Problem actions was added to the Problems panel hover. The Quick Fix action applies Quick Fixes from the hover and the Peek Problem action will open the peek view in the editor.
- From the Problems panel peek view, developers can now navigate to the previous and next error/warning.
- The appearance of the hovers and the Problems panel peek view was improved: Hovers with problems and code blocks are given enough space to show their contents.
- Preferred Code Actions: Extensions can now mark a Code Action (VS Code's Quick Fixes (the lightbulbs developers see in the editor) as "preferred" to indicate that it is the most reasonable fix for the underlying problem. When a preferred fix is available, a blue badge is added to the lightbulb. Preferred fixes can be automatically applied using the Auto Fix command (Shift+Alt+.).
- Debugging: Modify font size, font family, and line height of the Debug Console:
- Font configuration for Debug Console: Now it is possible to configure the font size, font family and line height in the Debug Console using these settings: debug.console.fontSize, debug.console.fontFamily and debug.console.lineHeight.
- Debug Console text wrapping: Thanks to the new tree widget adoption, the debug console now supports automatic text wrapping for all its elements, even attributes inside objects.
- Better IntelliSense for ARIA attributes: More detailed descriptions for HTML accessibility attributes are available thanks to data retrieved from W3C and MDN so VS Code now shows descriptions for ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) attributes and DOM events.
- Vue.js interpolations IntelliSense: The Vetur extension now provides IntelliSense (smart completions) for Vue.js interpolations. The completion items are sourced from Vue.js props, data, computed and methods API calls. The source code, along with any JSDocs documentation, are used as completion item descriptions. When using child components from parent components, Vetur also offers IntelliSense on the child component's props.
- New "Bundling Extensions" topic: Extension authors can use webpack to improve load time via a new Bundling Extensions topic.
All of the above and many more tweaks, fixes and new features are explained in detail in the release notes.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.