Very cool stuff.<p>I remember being at Build 2018 and asking the PM on the Live Share team if they had any plans to bring VS Code to the browser. Maybe do managed environments for labs and companies (what GitHub code spaces now is), would be great for education. Lots of students (especially non-CS nerds, like the physics kids with a CS requirement) find environment setup to be one of the hardest parts. He seemed to think I was a piece of shit for not ‘getting’ what Live Share was all about and how those other offerings (code spaces, running in the browser without install) were bad ideas not worth considering.<p>I think the moral of the story is, if you’re a PM, don’t treat your most enthusiastic customers like shit. Or maybe do, because it won’t actually have business impact.
This seems really cool, and seems like it took a lot of man hours to put together.<p>However, I'm not sure who this is for. Downloading and installing an application is not a particularly big ask for the type of people who use VSCode. The browser version will always be a compromised experience, given the inherent limitations of browser applications. Even if it works 99% of the time, that 1% would add enough friction to make it more of a hassle then it's worth.<p>The post gave some use cases involving hardware that can't easily run Desktop VSCode (e.g. iPads and Chromebooks). I just don't see that being much of a use case though, except in desperate circumstances where a more capable dev machine isn't available.<p>If there are some use cases I'm missing, I'd love to hear about them! This is a pretty new concept, and I certainly don't know how everyone likes to code. But from my perspective, I struggle to see any situation where someone would choose to use this, and few situations where someone would have to.
Not open-source yet, the best alternatives for self-hosting right now are:<p><a href="https://github.com/gitpod-io/openvscode-server" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/gitpod-io/openvscode-server</a><p><a href="https://github.com/cdr/code-server" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cdr/code-server</a><p>Update: also check the discussion about their differences <a href="https://github.com/cdr/code-server/discussions/4267" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cdr/code-server/discussions/4267</a> (IMO both are much slower and worse than vscode.dev)
LPT: press . on any github repository when logged in and it will open that repository in vscode.dev with everything set up<p>Similar to github codespaces without a real computer to back it up
This is exactly what I've been looking for. There was another site (forget the name, something-something-cloud) that supposedly did this but it seems abandoned and didn't work on any browser that I used.<p>An online VS Code would not only make doing quick things with GitHub repos much easier but can be great for people just getting into learning programming because it doesn't require installing anything, but you are essentially starting out with a professional tool.<p>That and every once in a while I'm not on my own computer thus it would be pretty nice to kill time coding with a VS Code instance that doesn't need installation.
I find a couple things pretty neat here:<p>1 - All of the screenshots are from a Mac. This never would have happened with the old MSFT.<p>2 - The performance of this is pretty good. Admittedly, I just played with this for a couple minutes, but even opening a folder with a bunch of files was snappy.
For those who think web-based IDEs are inefficient, I recommend giving VS Code in the browser a try: nowadays it's just as performant as it is on the desktop.<p>Even on the iPad it's just as performant (with 120Hz scrolling!), although as noted in the announcement, the file system limitations make it a bit of a pain to work with for ad hoc coding.
Interesting they're using tree-sitter for syntax highlighting. Obviously they can't run LSPs in the browser so this must have been an alternative. I'd be curious to see this get into mainline desktop VS Code though (and I'm not alone: <a href="https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/50140" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/50140</a>).
I'm intrigued by the use of webapps in this way, but I really think we need a better solution for rebinding keys in the browser. I tend to use Emacs bindings (which practically every editor supports), but they are a bit of a mess in browsers because even extensions can't clobber bindings like C-n, and I recall having issues with C-w and C-p as well. Otherwise, very exciting to have high-quality, zero-install tooling like this!
It’ll be interesting to see how this evolves compared with other players in this space. (Stackblitz comes to mind. They added support for “WebContainers” recently, for in-browser hosting of server-side code: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27223012" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27223012</a>)
It's not only an awesome technical achievement, but it has also so much potential to be useful.<p>And yet, something at the back on my head is screaming:<p>WARNING!<p>I have the intuition that, on the long run, using more and more tools that are not on your own machine will create a dependency on systems big companies control. And something tells me we are going to pay for it in the end.<p>So I'll stay away.<p>Maybe I'm getting paranoid, but I don't regret not having ever created a Facebook account, or not getting on the 2010 hype train of magical SAAS services like Firebase that lock you in eventually.<p>We'll see in 10 years I guess.
If you want to run you own version of this - try this <a href="https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/code-server" rel="nofollow">https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/code-server</a>, its very easy to configure. linuxserver has created code-server - which is vscode running in container. I have been running it in my personal network for nearly a year now. It great because it lets you code from any device. Sometimes I use this to quickly script out things on my ipad and then execute whatever script I have created using Terminus.
I was hoping this would be the thing that makes coding on an iPad not awful. But any keyboard shortcuts are consumed by Safari, so it's a pain to use. However, I hope that this enables the VS Code team to make a native iOS/Android VS Code app that would essentially just be a web browser that uses this functionality.
What's the feature that allows a website to open local files and folders?<p>Edit: I think I found it: File System Access API, supported by Chrome and Edge, not supported by Safari and Firefox
While I know it's not the fault of the vscode team, it sucks that Firefox feels like a second class citizen since it doesn't support the File System Access API.
I've love to see this for open source, especially integrated into GitHub. A simple "click here to contribute" button could really lower the barrier to entry for first-timers.
It seems to be like Theia <a href="https://theia-ide.org/" rel="nofollow">https://theia-ide.org/</a> which is based on vscode and runs in the browser. It's used by this project to give a full lab/workspace and ide in the cloud:<a href="https://www.eclipse.org/che/" rel="nofollow">https://www.eclipse.org/che/</a> (it's actually closer to vscode even though eclipse is in the name).
> quickly parked it (...) (or, if you are from the Boston area like me, we "pahked it"<p>What a strange joke to include on Developer docs.
Part of the Visual Studio Code brand is that it's open source. With this snarky announcement, they've changed that. I've been using <a href="https://vscodium.com/" rel="nofollow">https://vscodium.com/</a> and who knows when there will be a web version. :(
I wonder if this uses pretty much the exact same code as the desktop version. It seems to me that one of the big benefits of using Electron would be to have one codebase deployable as a desktop app and a website with very little change for each deployment.
> we "pahked it"<p>It took almost 30 years to finally get comfortable with the way native, mostly British, speakers pronounce R. It still doesn't feel right but I no longer fight.<p>I can still picture myself yelling my hard Rs at Google translate and it consistently failing to understand me.<p>Somewhat more on topic: I just realized I've been using nothing but Viscose for 2 years now. Still not as good as WebStorm but it's getting there. It wasn't nearly as good back in 2017.<p>Not sure I want it to be just a tab in my browser thought. Very cool nonetheless. We've come a long way
> <i>Develop on your iPad. You can upload/download files (and even store them in the cloud using the Files app), as well as open repositories remotely with the built-in GitHub Repositories extension.</i><p>With web apps, I’m always curious how well they support offline use. In this case, <a href="https://vscode.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://vscode.dev/</a> appears to do pretty well. You can “Add to Home Screen” on iPad and get the app working fullscreen with WiFi off.
File system access being one of the main reasons to put a web app in Electron, this could be a move toward the more lightweight future that some on HN have been clamoring for
I wonder if there will be better remote development support on vscode.dev? It used to work well for me, but in recent releases the remote functionality has gotten so flaky...
It's crazy how much the dev tooling space has evolved in just the last few years. VS Code is of course a big part of it, but there are a hundred offshoots providing CI/CD, dev VPS, source control integrations, language tools, static hosting, staging, functions. The next step, IMO, is more clarity. How do all these puzzle pieces fit together, and what is the "ideal" solution for me as an individual developer or a small team to use day-to-day?
Ok, you can use VS Code like an editor in a browser. But how are you going to compile / run the code if you can't install binaries on that machine?
Something worth noting – unlike offerings like Github Codespaces, code-server and others this one is running fully in your browser (no backing VM). This is both good (faster to start and run, no server roundtrips needed) and bad (can't install custom language toolchains or run build scripts, can't pause and restart on different machines). vscode.dev is specifically not a "cloud IDE".
I was an engineer on the Visual Studio team at Microsoft from 2002-2009. If you had told me it would eventually run in a web browser I would have thought your were crazy. Back then we had to work closely with the core Windows team (memory optimizations, etc.) just so that it could run natively on a semi-beefy PC. I'm pumped that the team has been able to pull this off!
What api is it using to let you create a file in a local directory? I know about <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FileSystem" rel="nofollow">https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FileSystem</a> but that's for virtualized filesystems
>"Fast forward to today. Now when you go to <a href="https://vscode.dev" rel="nofollow">https://vscode.dev</a>, you'll be presented with a <i>lightweight version</i> of VS Code running fully in the browser."<p>Does that imply there is functionality <i>missing</i> from the online version of VS Code?
It would be great if we could also run VSCode in terminal. It should theoretically totally be possible, but for some reason, there is still no good text-only browser supporting JavaScript.<p>Edit: Just tried brow.sh - only displays a white page. Might be a solution though
I don't think this will be a success.<p>If I get to choose between this and my own local installation, of course i will run the local version.<p>Why would I want to sit in the browser? To continue on the same cursor position I was if I switch computer? Not worth it at all.
FYI: You can't run/compile your code (yet), and by extension it means it won't show any error/warning (I tried deleting some lines). I'm guessing the next step is cloud build.
I'm already trying to edit PNGs but in Firefox no file system access API yet, so I tried uploading an image to edit in Luna Paint but it only loads an empty image?