News
May Release of Visual Studio Code 1.2 Includes Tab Preview
A big user request, tab support, is developed enough that it's now available in preview form for those working with the VSC Insiders Release.
- By Michael Domingo
- 06/16/2016
The May release of Visual Studio Code, version 1.2, was released to the site at https://code.visualstudio.com. That release includes a big user request: tab support, which is developed enough that it's now available in preview form for those who have access to the Insiders Release.
The VSC Insiders Release is aimed at developers who are active users of VSC and who want to get involved in its fine-tuning. According to a blog post, the Visual Studio Code team makes daily builds available through the program, so there is a constant churning of code that gets tested by developers participating in the program. It's available here.
From that Insiders Release, developers can check out the work-in-progress tab support, which allows for a number of editors to be opened in stacked tabs. The stacking capability is just the beginning, and more work is to be done before tabs become a full-fledged feature.
Of more significance in this release, though, are the enhancements and fixes that made this release.
In the Editor, automatically inserted whitespace can be tracked and trimmed out with an editor.trimAutoWhitespace setting. Right now, it's set on by default. Another enhancement has to do with a variation on Find and Replace that can be called up by pressing Alt+Enter, which pops up a dialog. Typing text in the dialog will find all instances within a file and typing the replacement over the first instance will replace all instances throughout the opened file.
Another new feature is the integrated terminal, which can be called up via View |Toggle Integrated Terminal. Doing so opens up a terminal window in whatever environment you happen to be working in ($SHELL when working within Linux and OSX; %COMSPEC% if in Winodws). It's an early implementation, and the notes caution that, for now, only one terminal at a time can be opened and some basic functionality still needs to be enabled, such as copy/paste.
There are a slew of other features and enhancements, including some additions to linting, CSS coding efficiencies (code completion, Go To and Peek Definition), and ability to use extensions from a command line, to name a few.
A healthy list of features is at https://code.visualstudio.com/Updates.
As of the 1.2.0 May release, another release dubbed version 1.2.1 hit the Web, fixing "several performance and Git integration issues." What was fixed? Find out at the link above.
About the Author
Michael Domingo is a long-time software publishing veteran, having started up and managed several developer publications for the Clipper compiler, Microsoft Access, and Visual Basic. He's also managed IT pubs for 1105 Media, including Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine and Virtualization Review before landing his current gig as Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief. Besides his publishing life, he's a professional photographer, whose work can be found by Googling domingophoto.