News

Visual Studio Code 1.38 (August 2019) Ships

• By David Ramel
• 09/05/2019

The August 2019 update (version 1.38) to Visual Studio Code, Microsoft's open source, cross-platform code editor, is available, featuring many enhancements.

Here's a top-level glance at what's new:

• Preserve case for global search and replace -- Keep letter casing across multi-file search/replace: "In the 1.37 release, we added a Preserve Case option to the editor's Find/Replace control. The same option is now available as the AB icon in global search and replace. There is also a new case preservation mode for hyphen-separated words."
• Settings editor string array validation -- Checks min, max, enum values, and glob patterns: "The settings editor now displays errors for array-of-string items if the current value does not satisfy the specified minItems, maxItems, item.enum, or item.pattern schema."
• Adjust cursor surrounding lines -- Keep your cursor centered in the editor: You can now customize the number of visible lines to display around the cursor when moving the cursor towards the beginning or end of a file by setting editor.cursorSurroundingLines. In the Vim editor, this feature is called scrollOff."
• Copy and revert in the diff editor -- Easily copy or restore deleted content: "There are new actions for copying or reverting deleted content when using the inline diff editor. Hover on deleted content in the inline diff editor and you can now."
  • Copy the whole deleted content
  • Copy a specific line
  • Revert the change
• Go to Line supports negative line numbers -- Quickly jump to the end of a file: "You can now type in negative line numbers to the Go to Line picker to navigate from the end of the file. For example, typing -1 will reveal the last line of the file."
• MDN Reference link for HTML and CSS -- Links to MDN documentation directly from IntelliSense: "VS Code now displays a URL pointing to the relevant MDN Reference in completion and hover of HTML & CSS entities."
• Add missing await Quick Fix -- Find overlooked awaits in asynchronous code: "Is your code getting a little ahead of itself? The new Add 'await' Quick Fix helps you await values that you may have overlooked in asynchronous code. This Quick Fix is available in TypeScript and JavaScript source code that has type checking enabled."
• Debugging data breakpoints -- Debugger breaks when tracked values change: "From the Variables view, it is now possible to create data breakpoints that will get hit when the value of the underlying variable changes. Just like other breakpoints, data breakpoints can be disabled/enabled and removed in the Breakpoints view."
• VS Code icon repository -- Official product icons available for extension authors: "We've published a repository of all of the VS Code icons for use by extension authors. There are dark/light versions of each icon, and we also linked to our Figma design file."
• Alpine Linux distro support -- Both for the Remote WSL and Containers extensions: "Work has continued 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. VS Code Stable preview support for Alpine Linux Containers, Alpine WSL distributions, and ARMv7l / AArch32 SSH hosts."

Many other new tweaks and enhancements are detailed in the announcement post, which, for VS Code, always comes a few days after the end of the month for which the update is named.

To get new VS Code features as soon as possible, Microsoft advises developers to download nightly Insider builds in order to put the latest updates through their paces immediately.