Extension authoring · code.visualstudio.com

Update 1.74.1: The update addresses these issues.

Update 1.74.2: The update addresses these issues.

Update 1.74.3: The update addresses this security issue.

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

Welcome to the November 2022 release of Visual Studio Code. There are many updates in this version that we hope you'll like, some of the key highlights include:

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

Insiders: Want to try new features as soon as possible? You can download the nightly Insiders build and try the latest updates as soon as they are available.

Accessibility

Audio cues for notebook execution

There are now audio cues for when notebook cells finish running. The cue is different to indicate whether the cell ran successfully or failed.

Audio cues for diff review mode

In a diff editor, when Go to Next Difference is triggered, a specific audio cue will play to indicate whether the cursor is on an inserted or deleted line.

If you are curious about the available audio cues, you can hear them via the Help: List Audio Cues dropdown.

List Audio Cues dropdown

Keyboard-navigable Settings editor indicators, hovers, and links

The indicators, hovers, and links in the Settings editor are now navigable by keyboard. The styling of some of the links have also been adjusted for better consistency across the Settings editor.

Settings editor indicator hovers now behave much better when it comes to tabstops and maintaining keyboard focus. This improved behavior is still experimental, and is currently only enabled for the Settings editor indicator hovers, rather than for all hovers across VS Code.

Navigating settings and a Modified elsewhere indicator in the Settings editor using the keyboard

Theme: Light Pink (preview on vscode.dev)

Workbench

Custom Explorer autoreveal logic

The highly upvoted issue #87956 ("Allow to set explorer.autoReveal per specific folder") has been fixed by the introduction of a new setting explorer.autoRevealExclude. This setting lets you configure which files get autorevealed in the Explorer if the autorevealing is enabled (explorer.autoReveal, default true). The autoRevealExclude setting uses glob patterns for excluding files and similar to files.exclude, also supports sibling matching via when clauses.

The default value excludes node and bower modules:

"editor.detectIndentation": false,
"editor.insertSpaces": true,
"editor.tabSize": 8,
"editor.indentSize": 2

Command to partially accept inline completions

The command Accept Next Word Of Inline Suggestion (editor.action.inlineSuggest.acceptNextWord) can be used to accept the next word/non-word segment of the current inline suggestion. Currently, it can only accept parts of the first line of an inline suggestion. The command is still under development and we are exploring keyboard shortcuts along with alternative splitting rules for future releases.

Source Control

Manage unsafe Git repositories

VS Code uses git.exe for executing all Git operations. Starting with Git 2.35.2, users are prevented from running Git operations in a repository that is in a folder owned by a user other than the current user, as the repository is deemed to be potentially unsafe.

Starting with this release, if you try to open such a potentially unsafe repository, VS Code will show a welcome view in the Source Control view as well as an error notification. Both the welcome view, and the notification expose the Manage Unsafe Repositories command that lets you review the list of potentially unsafe repositories, mark them as safe, and open them. The Manage Unsafe Repositories command is also available in the Command Palette. Marking a repository as safe will add the repository location to the safe.directory git configuration.

Optimistic user-interface updates

After executing a Git operation, a set of git commands (for example, git status) are executed to update the data model before the Source Control view is updated. There are scenarios in which running these commands can take several seconds to complete (for example, when working with large monorepos), resulting in a delay before the Source Control view is refreshed.

This milestone we have made changes so that the Source Control view is optimistically updated for some of the Git operations (stage, unstage, discard changes, and commit) before git status completes, resulting in a snappier Source Control view.

The new capability is enabled by default but it can be disabled using git.optimisticUpdate: false.

Commit action button polish

When the Commit action button is executing a secondary commit command (for example, Commit & Sync), the button label now correctly reflects the command being executed. The Commit button also shows an animation indicating progress.

Terminal

Terminal Quick Fix improvements

Terminal Quick Fixes are now presented in a Code Action control to align with the experience in the editor.

A Quick Fix is triggered in the terminal and a menu is presented with a play button to the left of the action's label

Task actions in the terminal dropdown

The Run Task and Configure Tasks commands appear in the terminal dropdown for increased discoverability and ease of access.

The last section of the terminal dropdown menu contains Run Task and Configure Tasks commands

Remote Development

Remote Tunnels is now available as a preview feature on VS Code Stable. Remote tunnels allow you to securely access your machine with VS Code from any device, anywhere. To enable remote tunnel access, you can either:

  • Choose Turn on Remote Tunnel Access from the Account menu or Command Palette.
  • Run code tunnel from a machine with VS Code installed and on the PATH.
  • Download the new VS Code CLI and run ./code tunnel.

Once tunnel access is turned on, you can connect to the machine from any device using vscode.dev, or using the Remote - Tunnels extension from within VS Code Desktop.

To find out more, check out our blog post announcing the feature or the Remote Tunnels documentation.

Theme: Codesong (preview on vscode.dev)

Note: If you were using the standalone code-server CLI, you should now use the VS Code CLI (via the latest VS Code Desktop or the standalone download mentioned above) instead.

Debugging

JavaScript debugging

Support for console.profile

The JavaScript debugger now supports console.profile. When running under the debugger, a CPU profile will be collected for code between console.profile() and console.profileEnd().

{
  "type": "node",
  "request": "launch",
  "name": "Launch Program",
  "program": "${workspaceFolder}/app.js",

  "serverReadyAction": {
    "pattern": "listening on port ([0-9]+)",
    "uriFormat": "http://localhost:%s",
    "action": "debugWithEdge",
    "killOnServerStop": true
  }
}

In the example above, when the original Launch Program debug session is stopped, the automatically started Edge debug session will also be stopped.

Exception breakpoints shown for the focused debug session

Managing exception breakpoints when running two different types of debug sessions did not work well previously. Now, when a debug session is focused in the Call Stack view, the correct set of breakpoints for that session's debug type will be shown.

Exception breakpoints correctly shown per call stack frame

The new setting comments.visible can be used to turn off editor commenting (the Comments bar and the in-editor Comments Peek view). The command Comments: Toggle Editor Commenting can still be used to toggle editor commenting on and off during a session. Selecting a comment in the Comments view will always toggle commenting on.

The Comments view shows a badge for the count of unresolved comments.

Comments view badge

Tasks

Problem matcher 'search' file location method

Previously, problem matchers needed to know exactly where to look for the problematic files, via the fileLocation property. The supported methods were absolute, relative, or autoDetect (check for relative paths first, then look for absolute paths in case of failure).

However, in workspaces that use scripts residing in nested subdirectories, it was difficult to set up tasks as different scripts seldom report file paths in a unified manner (for example, relative to the workspace's base directory).

To help with this problem, there is a new file location method, named search. With this method, a recursive file system search is run to locate any captured path.

The example below shows how to set up the search file location method (although, all parameters are optional):

    "engines": {
        "vscode": "^1.74.0"
    },

Log output channel

This milestone we finalized the LogOutputChannel API. You can now use this API to create a log output channel that will be used to log messages from your extension.

We also finalized the logLevel property and the onDidChangeLogLevel event in the env namespace to indicate the current log level of the application and fire an event when the log level changes for the application.

Consistent origin for all webviews

Following up on our work last iteration, all webviews in VS Code now try to maintain custom origins. With 1.74, this also extends to the webviews used by custom editors.

This improves performance by allowing webview content to be cached in more cases. See the previous release notes for more details and things to be aware of as an extension author.

Video tag support in extension README

Extensions can now use <video> tags in their READMEs. Videos are supported on both the VS Code Marketplace and on Extensions view pages in VS Code. Compared to .gifs, video files are higher quality and often smaller too. You can even include audio!

Keep in mind that only specific video and audio formats are supported in VS Code itself. At present, you must also use a full path to the <video> src and poster instead of a relative path.

The new menu location comments/commentThread/additionalActions allows extensions to contribute always-visible buttons to comment threads.

Visible button in a comment

Renaming of vsce to @vscode/vsce

The vsce tool, VS Code's extension manager, has been renamed to @vscode/vsce. This is a breaking change for anyone using the tool as a library. The CLI tool is still called vsce and can be installed via npm install -g @vscode/vsce.

Debug Adapter Protocol

Several clarifications and a new property were added to the Debug Adapter Protocol.

  • The DataBreakpointInfo request has a new optional frameId property. Clients can use this flag to specify which stack frame contains a name variable.
  • End-of-file behavior is now specified for the readMemory request.

Engineering

Name mangling of properties and method

Our product build now mangles names of properties and methods. This reduced the size of our main bundles by ~13% (-1.5 MB) and reduces code loading times by ~5%.

GitHub & Microsoft Authentication extensions bundle size improvements

The bundle sizes for these two extensions were larger than we wanted them to be, given what they provided and how critical they are for startup in many cases (such as vscode.dev). This milestone, we focused on decreasing the size of these extensions and here are the results:

  • GitHub Authentication: 93 KB -> 64.9 KB
  • Microsoft Authentication: 97 KB -> 57.7 KB

This was achieved by:

  • No longer depending (and bundling) node modules that provided functionality that is readily available in Node.js and the web (for example, removing uuid in favor of Crypto.randomUUID()).
  • Only using node-fetch in Node.js, instead of using it for both Node.js and the web.
  • Adopting the newest version of @vscode/extension-telemetry, whose size decreased considerably.

No functionality was lost in this process and these extensions are now fetched and loaded faster due to their decreased size.

Electron sandbox journey

You can learn about our progress toward enabling Electron's sandbox in the recent "Migrating VS Code to Process Sandboxing" blog post. This detailed article presents the technology timeline and describes the incremental changes made to support VS Code sandboxing.

If you want to try out VS Code sandbox mode, you can set "window.experimental.useSandbox": true in settings. Hopefully you should not notice any functional differences, but if you find issues, please report them back to us.

Window Controls Overlay re-enabled by default on Windows

The Window Controls Overlay (WCO) has been re-enabled by default. It was previously enabled in August, but then disabled again, because it was rendering on the wrong side for users using right-to-left system languages, covering up the File and Edit menu items.

The main issue was that VS Code wasn't passing the application locale to Electron, so Electron used the system locale to determine where to place the WCO. However, VS Code relied on Electron's app.getLocale() API to obtain the system language and determine what language pack to recommend, and passing in the application locale to Electron resulted in app.getLocale() returning that same locale instead of the system language.

To fix the issue, we added a new app.getPreferredSystemLanguages() API to Electron so that even after passing the locale to Electron, we can still get the system language to use for VS Code's language pack recommender, while keeping the WCO on the right side.

VS Code with the custom title bar along with Paint's title bar. The screenshot is taken on Windows 11 with the system language in Arabic, showing that the WCO is on the right for VS Code, which is in English, while it is on the left for Paint, which is in Arabic.

Built-in extensions now use the new l10n API instead of vscode-nls

Last month we stabilized the new Localization (l10n) API. This month, we have adopted that API in every extension found in the Microsoft/vscode repository. We still need to move language servers over to using @vscode/l10n instead of vscode-nls as well as some other extensions owned by the team (JS Debug, Python, Jupyter Notebooks, etc.) but we are moving in the right direction to a single localization story for all of our extensions.

Notable fixes

Thank you

Last but certainly not least, a big Thank You to the contributors of VS Code.

Issue tracking

Contributions to our issue tracking:

Pull requests

Contributions to vscode:

Contributions to vscode-css-languageservice:

Contributions to vscode-eslint:

Contributions to vscode-js-debug:

Contributions to vscode-json-languageservice:

Contributions to vscode-pull-request-github:

Contributions to debug-adapter-protocol:

Contributions to devcontainers/cli:

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