GitHub Codespaces

Interestingly, it seems that Microsoft hast just renamed its &quot;Visual Studio Online&quot; (which was basically the same as this new product) to &quot;Visual Studio Codespaces&quot;. So it seems that they are merging these two products. (See: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;visualstudio.microsoft.com&#x2F;services&#x2F;visual-studio-codespaces&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;visualstudio.microsoft.com&#x2F;services&#x2F;visual-studio-co...</a>)<p>EDIT: They actually announced the renaming of the product a couple of days ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;04&#x2F;30&#x2F;microsofts-visual-studio-online-code-editor-is-now-visual-studio-codespaces-and-gets-a-price-drop&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;04&#x2F;30&#x2F;microsofts-visual-studio-o...</a>

Ah, this really makes sense with all of the recent work they&#x27;ve done on VSCode&#x27;s remote development capabilities.<p>- An early announcement on their focus: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;02&#x2F;remote-development" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;02&#x2F;remote-develo...</a><p>- Most (all?) of their recent VSCode updates include improvements to remote development. i.e.: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;updates&#x2F;v1_44#_remote-development" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;updates&#x2F;v1_44#_remote-developm...</a><p>- Facebook partnering and becoming an early, heavy adopter: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.facebook.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;post&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;19&#x2F;facebook-microsoft-partnering-remote-development&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.facebook.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;post&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;19&#x2F;faceboo...</a>

My hope and suspicion is this will have a significant impact on the number of improvements to open-source projects and particularly little things like js components.<p>Just in the last few days, I&#x27;ve come across a few very minor bugs, with a one-line fix. In order to make that change, I currently need to fork the repo, download it, make the change (turn off my prettier or adapt to the repo&#x27;s) then make the PR.<p>I&#x27;m hoping with this I can just make a PR in the owner&#x27;s package. It&#x27;s the difference between a 10 minute commit and a 1 minute change.

Must be fun for @sytse to watch these GitHub announcements every year, where they consistently release the same thing GitLab rolled out two years prior.<p>Codespaces -&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.gitlab.com&#x2F;ee&#x2F;user&#x2F;project&#x2F;web_ide&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.gitlab.com&#x2F;ee&#x2F;user&#x2F;project&#x2F;web_ide&#x2F;</a><p>Insights -&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.gitlab.com&#x2F;ee&#x2F;user&#x2F;project&#x2F;insights&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.gitlab.com&#x2F;ee&#x2F;user&#x2F;project&#x2F;insights&#x2F;</a><p>GH Actions -&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.gitlab.com&#x2F;ee&#x2F;ci&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.gitlab.com&#x2F;ee&#x2F;ci&#x2F;</a><p>etc

I understand that many companies will be seduced by the offering and what could come next:<p>* No more source code on developers machine so better for security.<p>* No more development environment to setup and all the devs sharing the exact same settings: simplified onboarding of devs.<p>* No need for costly developers machines.<p>* No more infra to setup to host the source code repository, the CI&#x2F;CD workflows (even if many companies already moved that to the cloud).<p>But as a developer I am worried what could also come next:<p>* dashboards for managers with all sort of stats on developers: code quality with arbitrary rules, productivity (number of lines of codes), number of stars from other developers, etc.<p>* being locked-in with the Microsoft toolchain all along from source code edition to deployment in Azure. For instance currently I chose to do my NodeJs backend development on vim with coc-vim and found it to be much lighter than Vscode (I have a very old developers machine)

This is pretty epic. VS Code has proven itself to be one of the best (if not the best) and feature-complete editor out there. It&#x27;s basically an IDE of a ton of languages at this point, and it&#x27;s completely free. Integrating it with GH is a no-brainer move from Microsoft&#x27;s standpoint, to increase market share even further with more seamless integration.<p>If they&#x27;re able to do setup for Python, Go, Ruby, and JavaScript projects, I suspect that&#x27;ll be &gt; 50% of all professional work (both FOSS and private) done on GH.

Microsoft is really the best at the slow strategic burn.<p>* You host your project in github<p>* You fund your project using github sponsors<p>* You develop your project using github codespaces<p>* You compile, test and deploy using github actions<p>* You cloud host on azure<p>Each individual feature is definitely great. I&#x27;m not trying to be critical of Microsoft trying to turn their investment in github into a profitable business. This is a kind of vertical integration that is guaranteed to lead to some efficiencies.<p>One prediction based on this stack is the next piece could be some sort of subscription payment architecture. I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised to see some kind of Microsoft Marketplace integration coming, but maybe branded under github. Some kind of SaaS subscription enabler.

This is going to be great for open source—Being able to get a fully-configured dev environment at a click of a button greatly lowers the barrier to entry. I&#x27;ve had a few small OS contributions where the time to set up the environment was more than the time I spent programming!<p>I could also see this being popular with engineering teams. No futzing with the new hire&#x27;s computer, just have them open a web browser and they can dive right in!

From Microsoft&#x27;s point of view, it makes sense to merge Visual code with Github, as both are their properties. And it walks into the realm of repl.it and darklang, who are demonstrating people want to shorten the repl loop.<p>But I&#x27;m still wary of Microsoft, and remember them from the 90&#x27;s. Completely dominant and ruthless. Even though it&#x27;s new people now.<p>I can see them embracing open source development workflow, branching to eat up everything that has to do with your development workflow. Once Microsoft wins the ecosystem of open source developer workflow is when they&#x27;ll start to leverage it, using it as lead gen for the lucrative cloud&#x2F;dev ops services.<p>They&#x27;re playing a long game to beat Amazon AWS, and to beat off any new startups with shorter repls.

I wonder if it&#x27;s usable from an iPad. I haven&#x27;t tried an online ide before, but if it works well it could be a great mobile development tool.<p>It would be awesome if this could be setup as a backend for vim as well. Given how well Coc.vim integrates with VSCode tooling, I&#x27;m cautiously optimistic.

I&#x27;m getting tired of this game. Even the deaf ones like me start to hear the drums now.<p>You know, it&#x27;s not that we do not have enough megacorps controlling every aspect of our lives. We need more of the &quot;opposite&quot; - places that empower you <i>and</i> leave you in peace and control.

People hate on Electron apps, but it sure enables some cool stuff. I can&#x27;t imagine another sustainable way to build a fully-fledged IDE that runs as a desktop application that people love, _and_ can be run on a remote server instance, rendered and interacted with in the browser. Amazing.

I remember listening to Nathan Sobo, one of the founders&#x2F;creators of Atom, talking to The Changelog in 2017 about creating Atom and his goal&#x2F;dream to make it a collaborative editor, i.e. Google Docs for code [0]. He didn&#x27;t have a timeline but he had done research into it:<p>&gt; <i>That’s definitely something I wanna do; that’s not really in progress yet. I did a bunch of research in that area, so that I can’t really put a timeline on. I can definitely say that more async style traditional GitHub collaboration will be happening this year. I think there will be a natural outgrowth from that into the real-time stuff.</i><p>Don&#x27;t know if Sobo or his Atom colleagues do anything with the VS Code people, but hearing about Codespaces made me immediately think about his ideas for cloud editing.<p>(AFAIK the CodeSpaces presentation didn&#x27;t mention collaborative editing in its current feature set)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;changelog.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;241" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;changelog.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;241</a>

Having some thought about the GitPod folks[0] that provide nearly the same feature set.<p>I hope we are not witnessing a big sherlocking being done here, but… it really looks like one. :&#x2F;<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gitpod.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gitpod.io&#x2F;</a>

I can only imagine how the people at GitHub paid to work on Atom are feeling right now.<p>Microsoft hasn&#x27;t been kind to them!

At first glance this seems great for me. I was a big fan of Cloud9 before they were purchased by Amazon.<p>I was new to dev world and had never touched AWS so the transition to AWS C9 left me bewildered and I just gave up on it.<p>This seems like this would fill that role for me pretty well.<p>Bonus points - I currently use Visual Studio Code as my goto tool.

Hypothetically, say I wanted to build, I don&#x27;t know, a new spreadsheet that ran Python, runs on macOS and Linux. I hope it will give Excel a run for its money. Since Excel is so disappointing outside Windows.<p>Now I know Microsoft has a long history of safeguarding trade secrets, they were always very aggressive in this regard, from the beginning, the Xerox Parc days, and they still are. They state in their Investor Report that in Research &amp; Development, they safeguard trade secrets, and are a world leader in patent pursuit [1].<p>Surely I don&#x27;t need to worry that this platform for online development, tied to my source code, is not just another step towards making it easier for them to have a sneak peak into what I&#x27;m building? I know they can see my code in Github, but as a developer I know source code is one thing, but getting code to compile and run is a lot more work (on a very big project). This would make it even easier to dip into project runtimes, since IDE and environment settings are stored online now.<p>I mean, there&#x27;s no way that strategically, they would aggressively try to bulwark their own business lines, by snooping on competing tech, and using insights to help strategically direct their patent lawyers, advising them on who to go after an how. And anyway, even if they did do that occasionally, there&#x27;s no way they would bully me unjustly, I would surely deserve it. Right?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;investor&#x2F;reports&#x2F;ar13&#x2F;financial-review&#x2F;business-description&#x2F;research-development&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;investor&#x2F;reports&#x2F;ar13&#x2F;financial-re...</a>

What I&#x27;ve always wanted was to be able to easily browse code on Github:<p>* a file tree (do-able via the octotree browser plugin)<p>* clickable functions (Github is doing this on some projects in some languages I&#x27;ve noticed)<p>* caller tree. Xcode is one of the only navigator doing this, you can see the whole hierarchy of callers and go through them easily.<p>What we&#x27;re getting is something really cool, but it does not bring the caller tree function. It looks like this:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;holko.pl&#x2F;public&#x2F;images&#x2F;xcode-search&#x2F;call-hierarchy.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;holko.pl&#x2F;public&#x2F;images&#x2F;xcode-search&#x2F;call-hierarchy.p...</a>

It&#x27;s a neat idea and kudos to them for executing on this. However, it also triggers my spidey sense a bit. It makes me concerned about a far-flung future in which people who opt-out of the VSCode integration get a sub-optimal experience. Who knows if it will go this way but it may happen very slowly and without anyone noticing over a period of years. Corporate strategies often trend this way.

Looks great!<p>At least now we don&#x27;t need to run VS Code in another Chromium instance!<p>Now that Microsoft has Chromium Edge in Windows, it should be possible to provide a good way to spawn and communicate with Chromium GUIs&#x2F;windows from native Win32 apps! That would be killer!

Exactly as I predicted 2 years ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;axelfontaine&#x2F;status&#x2F;1007887082151469056?s=19" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;axelfontaine&#x2F;status&#x2F;1007887082151469056?...</a>

To me it is just something that grew by being distributed being merged into a monolithic entity. Merging and centralization seems reasonable at some point to solve big problems and iron out insignificant differences, and computing has always been swaying between distributed and centralized, but this is one scary centralization phase for me because it looks unprecedentedly global and because it concerns developers themselves. I don&#x27;t like fiddling with development environments (I kind of liked it first, actually) and toolchains (especially the web ones) just as much as anyone else, but I am afraid this might be too much lock-in.

This also seems quite similar to repl.it, which I&#x27;ve been enjoying a lot recently.<p>I wonder if they&#x27;ll support plugins and importing other VS Code settings to the online editor.

I wonder how they will (did?) work around the keyboard shortcuts that Chrome reserves (and doesn&#x27;t propagate to the page). For example, Cmd+T in VSCode opens up the quick search panel, while in Chrome it opens a new tab.

One of the hardest part getting anyone into Programming is actually setting up their Dev environment. ( You have many different platform, OS version or other compatibles issues... etc. And most student dont have clue about any of these ) You then have to teach them basic Git ( Github ) usage.<p>Cloud9 could be great but hasn&#x27;t gotten any traction apart from using it for some tutorials.<p>This Codespaces brings the best of both world and kill two birds with one stone.<p>The next step is Azure, hopefully they could have an Amazon Lightsail equivalent that is simple to understand and deploy without scaring beginners away.

I hope they allow to run the VMs on local hardware. I would love to use my desktop resources (more than they are offering, which is still generous) for this feature.<p>I think Chromebooks are going to be a great use for this. Lightweight client but full editor and environment, with no hassle.

So.. let&#x27;s say I host my source code with MS (GitHub), I develop using their web ide (visual studio code space) and then I deploy to their cloud (azure).<p>Give it a decade and you&#x27;ll have Microsoft specific developers and organizations who are locked in beyond rescue.<p>It&#x27;s always a fragmentation vs defragmentation battle.

I like how they say that if you don&#x27;t want to develop in a browser, you can connect VS Code. You&#x27;re still developing in a browser.<p>Still a great IDE though.

What languages does this support? It would be super cool if this supports `xcodebuild` :O

&quot;given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow&quot; If this succeeds in reducing the friction for someone to submit a patch&#x2F;bug fix, the number of &#x27;eyeballs&#x27; for open-source projects would increase substantially.

This is maybe the most relevant threat to the macbook pro product line I&#x27;ve seen in a while. Seems like I could do everything I need on an iPad with this, without Apple having to give me access to a shell in iOS.

I was just looking in to setting up &quot;VS Code in the browser&quot; with gitpod, code-server, and Visual Studio Codespaces last weekend. Gitpod looked nice but the fact that you can only customize the editor per-repository doesn&#x27;t make sense to me. Looks like GitHub has solved this by using a `dotfiles` repo. code-server looked decent but I would much rather auth &#x2F; secure the editor through GitHub. I tried to use Visual Studio Codespaces but I find Microsoft&#x27;s account system and Azure&#x27;s interface so infuriating. I&#x27;m really looking forward to this!

I still wish that PyCharm has some better remote development support... Basically this feature request: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtrack.jetbrains.com&#x2F;issue&#x2F;IDEA-226455" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtrack.jetbrains.com&#x2F;issue&#x2F;IDEA-226455</a><p>The VS Code remote development is already much better now, and only seems to get improved and extended more and more.<p>And then, going further, some online web version of PyCharm...

I am surprised this is not using atom. After all I that that was developed by the GitHub team. But I guess since Microsoft owns them VScode comes first.

This is a really good idea, however I think it&#x27;s somewhat marred by the pricing structure: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;azure.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-gb&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;details&#x2F;visual-studio-online&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;azure.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-gb&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;details&#x2F;visual-stu...</a><p>There should be a free tier as well as monthly options.

I can see why this is interesting from a project manager&#x27;s perspective. But why would I as a developer want this, let alone pay for it? Isn&#x27;t this the &quot;developing in a browser&quot; nightmare everybody was joking about a few years ago?<p>Maybe this will work for developing web applications which are executed on a remote machine by design, but everything else?

I see this as a major competition to Repl.it they have had GitHub integration for some time, but it&#x27;s clunky in my opinion...

Products like this have existed in various forms for a few years now, but this is poised to set a new bar. I wonder at what point a significant number of companies will start issuing their developers lightweight laptops and just having them use a web-based environment for everything. It seems almost inevitable (at least, when developing applications that are sufficiently abstracted from the underlying system).<p>Edit: it also occurs to me that this could be Microsoft&#x27;s big end-game from all of their recent dev-focused work and acquisitions (VSCode, NPM, GitHub, TypeScript, WSL, etc.). If they create a world where a significant fraction of developers who currently buy their dev environments from Apple start renting them from MS instead, that&#x27;s a huge deal. And of course there&#x27;s lots of potential for synergy with Azure on top of that.

Small bug in the signup page, if you select and then deselect &quot;Other&quot;, it still stores the selected state and doesn&#x27;t let you send the form [0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;tNAzrFw.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;tNAzrFw.png</a>

Is anyone else imagining a dystopian future where employers force you to use online code editors?

I am so excited about this. I&#x27;ve been using code-server [0] for a while now, because Visual Studio Online was not fast enough in Australia for me to use.<p>I have a VPS that runs code-server and I use &#x27;save as app&#x27; in Edge so that it captures control keys properly. It feels like it&#x27;s native and using ssh tunnels it feels 99% native, and I can pick back up working on any computer.<p>I ended up with this set up because I have a Galaxy Book S and VS Code doesn&#x27;t have an ARM build. Very excited!<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cdr&#x2F;code-server" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cdr&#x2F;code-server</a>

Very nice and much needed.<p>What worries me is the consolidation of great resources in the hands of one party. We know from our collective experience since forever that concentration of any resource does not give us resilience.<p>Your thoughts?

Oh, WOW! I was looking for something just like this recently.<p>I tried setting up Theia (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theia-ide.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theia-ide.org</a>) on windows and it was definitely not ready for major use.<p>I didn&#x27;t find anything else that fit the bill either, I hear something like this exists internally at google though.<p>I&#x27;m not typically a huge fan of Github (I&#x27;m sure that&#x27;s a controversial opinion) but this is definitely something I&#x27;m going to check out.

So how would the actual running of the code work?<p>I haven&#x27;t used GitHub in some time (using gitlab), so just wondering what are they using to run this stuff... because you&#x27;ll probably need a fullyfleged container service with secret management and whatnot. Does GitHub already provide this?<p>Also I&#x27;m guessing the editor won&#x27;t be using the same file system as the launched code, i.e. would hot reload be possible or do you have to commit and redeploy<p>Anyone have any ideas&#x2F;speculations?

There is an amazing free alternative: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;goitpod.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;goitpod.io</a><p>You simply prefix your GitHub (or gitlab) url with &quot;gitpod.io&#x2F;{your-repo} and you are instantly redirected to VM with with your repo cloned and ready to use, a fully customizable dev environment, vscode, extensions, machine is public on the internet so you can &quot;npm start&quot; and actually start serving your site.

This will probably affect sales of beefier Macs too. Why do you need a beefy machine when all compilation &#x2F; intelligence is streamed from the cloud?

I develop front ends for Laravel apps. The database is also on my desktop. With this would I need to host the database on its own server or can the Codespace also handle running a DB? Mainly asking because I only use laptops for co-working and meetups. Would love to ditch buying them and just use the iPad Pro that I have. Not sure how to handle the database if I&#x27;m on an iPad.

This is great news! I&#x27;ve been doing a similar setup to this for years with Jupyter Notebooks.<p>However, if I get to make a teeny tiny feature request (Nat, if you&#x27;re out there...) it would be about this:<p>&gt; <i>What if I don’t want to develop in a browser?</i><p>&gt; If you prefer, you can open a codespace in GitHub and then connect to it in VS Code.<p>I really kinda wish I could do the oposite, kinda like how Google Drive&#x27;s Colaboratory (essentially Jupyter Notebooks on Drive[0]) do: I would launch a CodeSpace on GitHub, and it would handle all of the UI and automation bits, but I would keep the &quot;environment&quot; hosted somewhere else (i.e. a Docker container exposing a CodeSpace agent&#x2F;headless VSCode through localhost:8080 that my browser talks to)<p>All of the gears seem to be already in-place for this to be possible given:<p>&gt; <i>How is Codespaces different from VS Code?</i><p>&gt; Codespaces sets up a cloud-hosted, containerized, and customizable VS Code environment. After set up, you can connect to a codespace through the browser or through VS Code.<p>The reasons for this are several:<p>- I bought a beefy computer for a reason, and want to use it. I don&#x27;t want to pay boatloads of money to Azure to have equal firepower to what I currently have idling;<p>- From an SRE perspective, your code, several times needs to be &quot;inside&quot; your infrastructure to run properly (because of roles, latency, you might be running Data Loss Prevention solutions, what have you), and this allows me to point the CodeSpace to a dedicated instance I have running inside a VPN on my own infrastructure;<p>- There are more, but I don&#x27;t want to make this too long and I&#x27;m failing to recall some of them.<p><i>So to sum it up:</i> I think this is a potentially great feature, as long as it doesn&#x27;t come coupled with the need to buy Azure instance time. This would (and I&#x27;m asserting this purely from my own gut, without a shred of evidence) probably lead to increased adoption for this feature, and as a corollary lead to selling more Azure instance time for those who do not want the hassle, without crippling those who actually need to keep some things &quot;in-house&quot;.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;colab.research.google.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;colab.research.google.com</a>

I&#x27;m slightly surprised all the screenshots are based on MacOS and that Microsoft didn&#x27;t require them to look like Windows 10.

Is the browser editing powered by Monaco or something else entirely? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;monaco-editor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;monaco-editor</a><p>Both repl.it and codesandbox.io seem to be Monaco based. This seems to have better support for VS Code extensions than what&#x27;s available in Monaco.

I couldn&#x27;t find any info on how much memory&#x2F;vCPU these will have available or if it&#x27;s configurable, does anyone know?

Oh, now things are getting interesting.<p>I was a big fan of the idea of GitLab IDE, but never got too deep; it seemed like a great idea that could use more baking. But then I saw Theia and GitPod. I like GitPod, but I just wish it had better Github integration.<p>Well, yeah. So... good job Github. Can’t wait to try this one out.

This is great. We all knew it was coming, but I wish they hadn&#x27;t axed xray.<p>Has vscode performance improved in recent history? Are there any plans to replace hot code paths with Rust or wasm? Has modal editing improved? I&#x27;m not against using vscode, but even with codespaces it&#x27;s a hard sell.

Isnt this what google cloud shell + editor [1] already does ?<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;google-cloud&#x2F;developing-on-gcp-getting-started-with-cloud-shell-editor-e074f2fa49d9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;google-cloud&#x2F;developing-on-gcp-getting-st...</a>

Amazing, this finally turns the iPad into a legit remote dev machine. No need to setup a DO VPC either.

Will this support Teletype style multi-cursor collaboration? I&#x27;m very excited about this for easy dev environment setup but if it had easy collaboration it would be immediately adoptable at my org for pair programming while we&#x27;re all pandemic-remote.

Argh--does anyone understand what this is supposed to be? (beyond what GitHub already provides)

I&#x27;ve already been using VSCode remote over SSH on cheap yet powerful Hetzner instances. You can do this on any cloud vendor and you can, if you want, put your home directory as a volume and resize up and down your machine as you want.

Does this work on iPad?<p>I was under the impression this bug is blocking VSCode and other electron based apps.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.webkit.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=149054" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugs.webkit.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=149054</a>

It&#x27;s interesting that Microsoft acknowledges the fact that their native windows platform is really not good for a lot of developer. Linux is better. The web is even better. Good direction they&#x27;re heading to.

Once they have all the coding sessions recorded they can finally replace those pesky devs &#x2F;jk. But seriously, is there anything in the conditions about ability to record coding sessions of say open source devs?

Sounds good, microsoft is building some interesting tools lately. I use visual code on the desktop for various languages, so it is a welcome to see it will be supported online through github repositories.

So now that the IDE is on the web, it would be pretty neat to be able to automatically launch interactive debugging sessions when breakpoints are hit in CI jobs.<p>Does any CI solution already offer something like this?

This feels like a step toward a contemporary &quot;VB6&quot; in the cloud.

I hope this accelerates interest around web-based development environments. If someone could pre-package a setup containing language servers for &quot;all&quot; languages, a build system that is generic to all languages (bazel or bazel-like), and internally run a small kube cluster with a wildcard DNS name pointing to it you&#x27;d reduce ops work of setting up staging environments, feature branch testing, development environment management, etc for most development teams by at least 10%.<p>I can&#x27;t wait for a monorepo-friendly staging&#x2F;development environment that works out of the box and can provide cross-language &amp; generated code autocompletions for &quot;every&quot; language.

Can someone explain how &#x27;build&#x27; is done with the obvious targetting of platforms and build configs etc? Does the build happen locally? On a rented server? Serverless?

Wow this seems pretty sick.<p>Gitlab has a decent web ide, I think this may be github playing catch up, but I&#x27;m hopeful that this competition gets us a better product on both sides.

This is great - it basically is signalling how Microsoft is thinking about GitHub. I think vscode is on its way to be owned by the GitHub team.<p>Will the same happen to Azure Devops ?

I was expecting this years ago when GitHub started work on Atom. This will be quite useful for people who are willing to participate in the Microsoft ecosystem.

OT: For those who like to have VS Code&#x27;s features in an super responsive console environment: Check out coc.vim for nvim. It&#x27;s a masterpiece.

Being able to connect, do the work, run tests and everything without needing a strong laptop sounds like a good solution for people who like to travel.

&gt; Get the <i>full</i> Visual Studio Code experience without leaving GitHub.<p>I&#x27;m going to go out on a limb here and say that statement isn&#x27;t quite accurate.

So is this another play to lock us into Azure Cloud?

&#x27;How much does Codespaces cost? Codespaces is free while in beta. Plans and pricing will be announced as the beta progresses.&#x27;

I have no idea about VS Code. For which languages is this good for? Javascript I guess. What else? C, C++, Java, python or such?

This looks excellent. Can easily see this vertically integrating across Azure to become a strong competitor to AWS + Lambda.

Is this built on top of open source technology? Say, can I integrate it into a gitlab instance, or host it on my own server?

This is great, I can&#x27;t help but feel like the whole point of rewriting a part of VS in JS was to get to this stage.

Is this a new main competitor to AWS Cloud9?

So seems like GitHub is in the shape of VS Code now. Good job Microsoft. Atom is not your child anymore.

This looks nice to show off code and do 1-2 line fixes.<p>Don’t think I would write a full app or module in this though.

I wonder if it will be possible to install extensions, I want my Vim keybindings!

Isn&#x27;t that antithetical to the entire idea of git <i>and</i> of Microsoft?

This is going to be amazingly useful.<p>It&#x27;s also some pretty serious vertical integration for Github&#x2F;Microsoft!<p>IDE: Github Source control + collaboration: Github CI&#x2F;CD: Github Hosting: Github + Azure (with docker and azure functions that experience is pretty much already there technically?)

Is there a list of supported languages or environments for this yet?

So how would this differ from CodeSandbox or StackBlitz?

I wonder what they use on the backend. Is it .NET Core?

Can you compile, run and test your code online as well?

The more Microsoft move from Azure to GitHub the better

GitHub vs Gitlab best thing for this decade.

Interesting to see VScode in github. Slowly integrating Microsoft’s feature. I think we can soon expect something like Create a MS PowerPoint from code comments

nice! thought about an environment like that. would be great to have python, golang and c&#x2F;cpp runtimes.

Final nail in the coffin of Atom, adieu.

As long as I can get vim keybindings...

Dear Diary, today I saw the future

MSFT loves devs :)

#20880

Wasn&#x27;t one of the primary reasons for the creation of git to be &quot;decentralized, offline&quot;?<p>This is counterintuative to that.<p>Call me paranoid, but you&#x27;d have to be a madman to<p><pre><code> * Store all of your source code with Microsoft (GitHub &#x2F; npm) * Now start authoring all of your said source code online with yet another Microsoft product </code></pre> That&#x27;s a stupidly huge amount of trust to put into Microsoft.

So much Github marketing spam today, maybe the admins should look into whether they are sending out coordinated upvote instructions to employees?

Github is getting Microsofted, there were some good things about this in the recent past, but I wonder...

Typical Microsoft strategy: Embrace, extend and extinguish<p>Soon the Platform will be renamed &#x27;Microsost Visual Studio Github&#x27; or &#x27;Microsoft team Github&#x27;. Then &#x27;microsoft Visual studio hub&#x27;.<p>Then at somme point, Github will be inside Visual studio code online and not anymore the other way around!

Great, but Github doesn&#x27;t even support sorting your repositories into folders and is ignoring years-old requests to change that: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dear-github&#x2F;dear-github&#x2F;issues&#x2F;74" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dear-github&#x2F;dear-github&#x2F;issues&#x2F;74</a><p>Gitlab does.

So GitHub (Microsoft) continues to venture way beyond just source control and it&#x27;s directly related areas, into a much more overall &quot;development&quot; strategy, seemingly echoing what GitLab have been doing for a while.<p>It&#x27;s sad to see GitHub moving slowly into spreading itself too thin, instead of just improving the platform they have. They now try to replace CI services, donation platforms and now remote code editors.<p>Seems their core service is still holding up so far, but with all these moves in different directions, I&#x27;m getting a bit worried that the SCM and software collaboration part will be left out. I think GitHub becoming SourceForgeV2 is closer than people think. It&#x27;s bound to happen at one point.