Visual Studio Code is now open source

We&#x27;ve been asked this by a few people, so I figured this is a good place to respond:<p>Will PTVS (Python Tools for Visual Studio) come to VSCode?<p>The answer is YES! This will be a major focus next year. Expect full intellisense, debugging, profiling, pkg mgmt, unit test, virtual env, multiple interpreter, Jupyter, etc. support.<p>Disc: Python&#x2F;R&#x2F;Jupyter team lead<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.visualstudio.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;python-vs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.visualstudio.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;python-vs</a>

I wasn&#x27;t sure what to expect from VSC, especially going into it I was worried that it would just be a MS-branded, bloated version of an already-slow Atom.<p>My expectations were completely wrong, though. VSC is not bloated or slow. It&#x27;s well-made. There aren&#x27;t really any negative MS-flavored conventions as far as I can tell. This isn&#x27;t MS Office (which I guess has its place but has gone off the deep end, IMHO). It looks like it&#x27;s on a path towards becoming a pretty powerful tool, more than just a text editor, and more than just a clone of Atom.<p>The MS branding will unfortunately keep people away that like to judge books by their cover. But that says more about their own problems and unwillingness than it does about MS.<p>I don&#x27;t understand why we have to throw ourselves into brand &quot;camps&quot; and defend them to the death. It&#x27;s dumb. I like Linux, I use an assortment of operating systems depending on my needs, and I don&#x27;t see any reason why a decent effort&#x2F;product can&#x27;t be appreciated, no matter what company produces it.

FYI, it seems that Visual Studio sends a lot of data about your usage back to Microsoft.<p>&quot;This includes information about how you use the products and services, such as the features you use, the web pages you visit, and the search terms you enter.&quot; (among other things such as name &amp; device identifiers <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.visualstudio.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;dn948229" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.visualstudio.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;dn948229</a>)<p>You can disable this...but it requires you to re-disable it on every product update. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;Docs&#x2F;supporting&#x2F;FAQ#_how-to-disable-telemetry-reporting" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;Docs&#x2F;supporting&#x2F;FAQ#_how-to-di...</a><p>Is this now standard practice?

I really hate how MS names things. Microsoft SQL Server, or as most people call it SQL Server. I read the title to this post as Visual Studio code is now open-source - but it&#x27;s not. The product some genius called Visual Studio Code has been opened.<p>I&#x27;m really surprised Windows isn&#x27;t called Microsoft Operating System, or Operating System for short.

I actually visited the VS Code team at Microsoft a few weeks ago for a product-research day where they brought in developers from small teams from around the US. I had heard that this was the plan, and I&#x27;m excited to see that it has since happened. They showed some compelling features (still not-yet released) that I think would bring this well-beyond a simple Atom competitor. Once they bring the debugging and linting features to other languages (Python, Ruby, Go), I think this won&#x27;t just be seen in the same category as Atom.

VSC has revolutionized how I code on Linux. Thank you, Microsoft!

Shameless self-plug: we also released (and open-sourced) a significantly more powerful PowerShell plugin for VS Code today[1][2] as well as a set of .NET and JSON APIs, the PowerShell Editor Services[3], that sits behind it. We welcome contributions and feedback, and feel free to hit up the developer David Wilson, @daviwil, or me, @joeyaiello.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.com&#x2F;b&#x2F;powershell&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;17&#x2F;announcing-windows-powershell-for-visual-studio-code-and-more.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.com&#x2F;b&#x2F;powershell&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;17&#x2F;announ...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;PowerShell&#x2F;vscode-powershell" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;PowerShell&#x2F;vscode-powershell</a><p>[3] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;PowerShell&#x2F;PowerShellEditorServices" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;PowerShell&#x2F;PowerShellEditorServices</a>

Has anyone spent a lot of time with VS Code? I tried it a while back when it was first announced and have not found a reason to re-visit it yet. At the time it felt like a sublime-text alternative instead of an IDE (was it always positioned to be just an editor?) Always great to see more options though.

No modal&#x2F;vim mode? (The Googles indicate &quot;no&quot;.) I <i>want</i> to love you, Visual Studio Code, but that&#x27;s a deal-breaker. Looks like the plug-in system is up, so maybe it&#x27;ll come down the road.<p>Though it&#x27;s probably my color-blind eyes, but I couldn&#x27;t find a stock dark theme that worked for me (first time I&#x27;ve had that out-of-the-box problem).<p>So between not being able to read the text on the screen that well, and an input model that doesn&#x27;t fit well with what I&#x27;m used to, I guess I&#x27;ll come back in six months. :-)<p>EDIT: and no Java syntax highlighting? I understand that it&#x27;s a beta&#x2F;WIP, but really? ObjC seems to work okay.

This is pretty amazing from the company that was trying to kill Linux just a few years ago and is now adopting that mentality for developing and delivering software.<p>While I don&#x27;t want to be negative; this and other recent moves by MS, seem to be an effort to lighten the overladen ship that is the MS super-tanker. Will moves like this prevent them from sinking? Personally, I switched away from MS products in 1996 and have never looked back, and this does make me wonder...

&gt;TIME-SENSITIVE SOFTWARE. The software will stop running on 31&#x2F;12&#x2F;2016 (day&#x2F;month&#x2F;year). You will not receive any other notice. You may not be able to access data used with the software when it stops running.<p>What does this mean. Should I expect a working VCS instead of this one in 2017?<p>Is not a condition I like in the terms of my main tool.

As an Atom user that&#x27;s only dabbled with VS Code when it was announced, what are its advantages? Last time I tried Code it seemed like a fork of Atom with Microsoft branding.

That&#x27;s cool!<p>However, anyone read the privacy policy?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.visualstudio.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;dn948229" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.visualstudio.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;dn948229</a>

Unsurprisingly, Visual Studio Code is mostly (62% at the moment) written in TypeScript!

Pretty cool! I&#x27;ve been using it a bit on the days where I have to do stuff on Windows, mostly for hacking on C++ code and playing with GL shaders (the code is cross-platform with CMake, so I don&#x27;t really need Visual Studio).<p>I&#x27;ve had a few ideas about little things to add to it, and having it open source makes that a possibility!

I&#x27;ve been using VSC for a few months now for side projects and I really like it. I&#x27;ve ditched notpad++ for it without any regrets. I&#x27;m not a fan of using my full blown VS2015 either for nodejs&#x2F;web projects. Glad to see support for nodejs debugging this will be useful.

The only thing I wish VS Code had is &quot;Compiling&quot; out of the box. I know you guys want to make an amazing experience for each language, but one of my favorite editors is Geany because no matter the language or platform when I hit build &#x2F; compile it usually just works. Hoping now that it&#x27;s gone open source we will see minor changes like compiling &#x2F; building cross platform at least. Other than that it&#x27;s a great editor, definitely simple enough and wonderful to work with.

I hope this move paves the way so that VSCode will now have the Code Collapse feature which has been requested tremendously.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;visualstudio.uservoice.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;293070-visual-studio-code&#x2F;suggestions&#x2F;7752321-add-code-folding-support" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;visualstudio.uservoice.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;293070-visual-studi...</a>

What I find quite odd is Microsoft rarely seems to show up on front page of HN, then all of a sudden in concert all of the top links on front page are Microsoft related.<p>It&#x27;s not that they&#x27;re not doing good things to help fix their culture, but I find it almost annoying. It seems almost impossible to me that all this promotion is not coming from them directly..

The project has come a long way,since the early days of the Monaco code editor. Really happy seeing it finally come to the open!! :D

Want support for Ruby and&#x2F;or Rails? Go cast your votes here <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;visualstudio.uservoice.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;121579-visual-studio-2015?query=ruby" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;visualstudio.uservoice.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;121579-visual-studi...</a>

How does this compare to Brackets? <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;brackets.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;brackets.io</a> Anyone has experience?

I&#x27;m praying that a vim mode will be released for VS Code soon. Visual Studio&#x27;s VsVim is excellent, and a VSC plugin of equal capabilities would convince me to adopt VS Code for typescript development. Fingers crossed!

Really happy to hear that. I&#x27;ve been using it over Sublime.

Met with a couple of folks from the SQL Server team at RubyConf. They really just blended in - they weren&#x27;t even wearing Microsoft shirts or anything. The seemed genuinely concerned about the cross-platform story, and went so far as recommending a &quot;competing&quot; product for SQL Server tooling on OSX.

They broadcasted the open-sourcing live on Channel 9. They sure know how to get programming nerds excited. :)

I wonder how VSC works with node APIs?<p>One thing I really dislike about Atom is it&#x27;s complete reliance on and lack of abstraction over the node APIs, making it nearly impossible to port to run hosted (which really confuses me, as I&#x27;d think that Github would love to have a great online editor integrated right into repos).<p>If VSC only uses async APIs, it might be easier to get running in a browser.<p>Also, Atom&#x27;s security model is very weak. Extensions have direct access to node APIs (as do iframes! but that&#x27;s an Electron issue). Sandboxing extensions would be a huge deal for me.

VSC is possibly the new Emacs and JavaScript is the new Lisp.<p>Eh, could be worse.

For those who are, like me, ignorant: VS Code is a source code editor...<p>I find it funny that nowhere on the official page (code.visualstudio.com) does it say that it&#x27;s an editor.

Slightly bizarre that the requirements[1] imply that it supports OS X and Linux but not Windows 7. I understand that they&#x27;re under the cosh to get people to upgrade, but still.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;Docs&#x2F;supporting&#x2F;requirements" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;Docs&#x2F;supporting&#x2F;requirements</a>

Why they are doing this? I mean why they are open sourceing? They have open sourced .NET and for example they have support for Cordova.

I didn&#x27;t realize code completion &#x2F; autocompletion &#x2F; IntelliSense for JavaScript NPM modules required TSD. I followed the steps in this guide[0] and it seems to work fine.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;Docs&#x2F;runtimes&#x2F;nodejs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;Docs&#x2F;runtimes&#x2F;nodejs</a>

As there seem to be some of the involved developers hanging around here:<p>Thank you and great job on this!<p>VS Code is from my perspective the most responsive web-based editor. The extension story looks sane and well-designed (+1 for things like async completions wich are e.g. missing in Sublime and pluggable debuggers!). And getting this delivered as open source software is just great!

I love this new Microsoft.

How is the support for C#? Does it support debugging web apps on Mac OS X? Is there any basic refactoring for it?

I usually use a minGW environment when I have to use a Windows box - which gives me GDB, GCC, ld etc. I&#x27;ve found it can be really frustrating to set up properly. I really miss Emacs. This sounds like it could be missing piece. How is its support for C&#x2F;C++ ?

Feels like a nicely responsive and down-to-earth editor. It&#x27;d be great with a color scheme that emphasized your own variables and fields. It&#x27;s not that helpful to draw attention to constants, keywords and arbitrary non-reserved identifiers like `document`.

Why did MS fork atom.io again? Why didn&#x27;t they do Facebook-style and just add modules that supported their stuff like how react ecosystem is now supported? Atom was slow but is picking up speed now and would be nice if it was simply aligned.

Does it support fuzzy matching filenames yet? That was one big missing feature for me

A good editor does not need to be open source to have a good eco-system based on plugins (like sublime). The MIT license seems to be friendly who would fork to make a more specific editor for some special language&#x2F;purpose.

I like it, but the themes section of the marketplace should probably have previews.

I just looked at Github, and most of the source is written by Typescript. I wonder what kind of GUI framework they are using? This application is cross platform. How do they make it??

The only feature that still keeps me from using it is that the debugger won&#x27;t work when the app to debug is running inside a docker container.<p>Does anyone know if this will be ever be possible?

I liked Visual Studio when I used it for a university mandated project years ago. If Microsoft had open sourced this a decade ago, I might actually be using it today.

Good to know! Microsoft moving towards OpenSource community, early i didn&#x27;t see much. I&#x27;ve been using it since 2009. They did massive improvements.

Seems like an Atom fork. And the amount of people who are hardcore Linux user but have yet to find a better IDE than vsc on this thread.

Good, maybe now I can get code-folding.

How does this compare to Atom? I&#x27;ve not kept up with either very well. I still just use Sublime.

Never thought I&#x27;d run Visual Studio on my linux machine!!! Thank you Microsoft!

But does it have vi bindings?

Visual Studio Code does not yet support JSX, nor properly supports ES6, so it&#x27;s currently unusable to modern Javascript devs. Which is a shame, because it has a lot of potential! I&#x27;ll be watching this closely to see when it becomes usable in my workflow.

VS code is more or less just a &#x27;pretty&#x27; text editor.

My Python colleagues would still rather stay with PyCharm..

Feel the Force, Open Source!!!

after the update I can no longer format xml files using alt+shift+f

was expecting msft open sourced the compiler, linker, msbuild, etc

Interesting!!!

Nice One

what about visual basic for dos?

The name of the &quot;VS Code&quot; product makes the title a little mis-leading. I thought the code for &quot;Visual Studio&quot; was open sourced. Turns out it&#x27;s just this stripped down editor called &quot;Visual Studio Code&quot;.

Welcome to the dark side.<p>Feel the power of the Empire.<p>Linux - I am your father!<p>:-)

The good: The Monaco editor component that Microsoft paid a lot of money is now under MIT license. (bought the company from Switzerland)<p>The bad: they refactored it to TypeScript (from Javascript)<p>The ugly: the sole existence of TypeScript and some ES6 syntax is the monaco editor project and Visual Studio Online and Visual Studio Code is a fork of it.

Is it me, or is that a Macintosh screenshot of the github page?

Nice move MS. Too bad it ~10 years too late

Who cares, VS Code is nothing more than a fancy text editor. Not and IDE.

It&#x27;s funny how on the intro video [1] on the Visual Studio Code homepage [2], the presenter is using apple macbook right in front of the Microsoft logo in the background :)<p>[1] - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;Nc82DB5" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;Nc82DB5</a> [2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;</a>

Don&#x27;t a lot of advanced folks avoid reliance on &quot;visual paint&quot; style programming?<p>Do folks like Linus and John Carmack crank up Eclipse and use wizards?<p>[ EDIT: I&#x27;ve obviously offended some Visual programming fans. I apologize. ]