Re: Visual Studio Code 2017 Version
Violetta Wagganer
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.
You can now select multiple tabs simultaneously, enabling you to apply actions to multiple editors at once. This new feature enables you to move, pin, or close several tabs with a single action. To add another tab to your selection, use Ctrl + Click (Cmd + Click on macOS). To select a range of tabs, use Shift + Click.
We are introducing the Always Show Editor Actions setting. When you enable this setting, the editor title actions of each editor group are always shown, regardless of whether the editor is active or not.
With disable-lcd-text, you can disable RGB subpixel rendering on Windows. The disable-lcd-text setting is now supported as a runtime argument in the argv.json file. Previously, it was only available as an undocumented CLI flag. Use the Preferences: Configure Runtime Arguments command to configure the runtime arguments.
Previously, when you opened a new VS Code window, it used the profile of the active window or the default profile, if there was no active window. You can now specify which profile should be used when opening a new window by configuring the window.newWindowProfile setting.
After you set notebook.experimental.find.scope.enabled to true, the Find in Cell Selection toggle will be available in the Find control. You can then select a range of cells and either open the Find control or, if it's already open, select the "Find in Cell Selection" button.
Notebooks now support a new kind of Code Action, which is defined with the notebook.format Code Action Kind prefix. These Code Actions can be triggered automatically via an explicit formatting request (using the command Notebook: Format Notebook) or a formatting on save request.
These can be used to provide more powerful formatting, through the use of Workspace Edits and Notebook Edits. To get started, check out an example extension in the vscode-extension-samples repository.
The canvas renderer was deprecated in the VS Code 1.89 release and is now removed completely. This means that on the small number of machines that do not support WebGL2, the terminal now uses the DOM-based renderer. You can read more about GPU acceleration in the terminal documentation.
The setting terminal.integrated.rescaleOverlappingGlyphs, introduced as a preview feature in the VS Code 1.88 release, is now enabled by default. This feature rescales glyphs that overlap following cells that are intended to cover ambiguous-width characters, and which might have font glyphs that don't match what the backing pty/unicode version thinks it is.
Tip: Use the right arrow key to quickly attach context in the background while you keep the context picker open. When you're in the editor, you can also right-click on a selection and choose Copilot > Add Selection to Chat.
GitHub Copilot Enterprise users in VS Code can now ask questions that are enriched with context from web results and your enterprise's knowledge bases. To try out this functionality, install the latest pre-release of Copilot Chat.
In the Chat view, you can ask questions like @github What is the latest LTS of Node.js? #web to take advantage of web search. Any search results referenced by Copilot are displayed in the Used References section of the chat response.
You can also ask questions about your enterprise's knowledge bases, which are collections of Markdown repositories containing documentation, directly from VS Code. Simply type @github #kb to pick from the knowledge bases available to you. Similarly, any knowledge base snippets referenced by Copilot are displayed in the Used References section of the chat response.
This enables Copilot Enterprise users to combine search results and internal documentation with editor context by using existing chat variables, such as #file and #selection. Please try it out and share your feedback with us at -copilot-release!
We now support basic IntelliSense within Copilot-generated code blocks. This lets you use many of the same IntelliSense tools that you might already use in the editor and can help you better understand the generated code.
IntelliSense for TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS code blocks is available out of the box. For additional language support, try installing an extension for that language, although not every language extension already has support for code block IntelliSense. Please file feature requests for any languages that aren't yet supporting this.
You can now move a chat request that is completed or still active from inline chat to the Chat view. You might use this feature to clean up inline chat and move conversations to a more persistent place. To move a request, select the chat icon next to the chat input box.
If you use the Copilot Chat extension, the Copilot-powered rename suggestions are now triggered automatically when you rename a symbol. You can turn this feature off by using the setting github.copilot.renameSuggestions.triggerAutomatically.
The experience with pytest when using the Python Testing Rewrite has been improved to offer better support for setting pytest's cwd when it is adjacent to the VS Code workspace root, and for displaying parameterized tests on the test explorer when function names are repeated across classes.
You can now run your Python code in an editor-like REPL environment equipped with features like Intellisense and syntax highlighting to make interactions with the REPL more efficient. To enable this feature, set "python.REPL.sendToNativeREPL": true in your settings.json file. This will execute code in the Python Native REPL on Shift+Enter and Run Selection/Line.
There has been more progress on the GitHub Pull Requests extension, which enables you to work on, create, and manage pull requests and issues. Review the changelog for the 0.90.0 release of the extension to learn about the other highlights.
We added support for text-to-speech capabilities to the VS Code Speech extension. A new setting accessibility.voice.autoSynthesize can be enabled to automatically read out aloud Copilot Chat responses when voice was also used as input.
We have improved the issue reporting flow in VS Code for the Web to match what users currently have on desktop. Selecting Help: Report Issue opens the issue reporter page in a new window, where users can select a bug type, source, and extension if necessary. Extension information, system information, and more is automatically attached to the issue that is created in GitHub.
The yo code extension generators for TypeScript and Web now have an option to use esbuild as bundler. When you select esbuild, this creates a esbuild.js build script and adds script entries in package.json and build tasks in .vscode/tasks.json.
We have finalized APIs that enable extensions to participate in chat and to access language models. See the extension sample and the chat extensions doc page for more information, or watch the Enhancing VS Code extensions with GitHub Copilot talk we delivered at the Microsoft Build conference.
The Chat Participants API enables extensions to extend GitHub Copilot Chat with a chat participant that can be invoked in the chat input field with @. The participant can reply to user requests with markdown, a file tree, buttons to run VS Code commands, or other types of content.
The Language Model API enables access to Copilot's chat models, such as gpt-3.5 and gpt-4. This API can be used for chat participants but also to enrich other features. The API is built around LanguageModelChat objects, which are used for chat requests and for counting tokens.
The only way to access chat objects is the vscode.lm.selectChatModels function. The function accepts a selector to narrow down on different properties of chat models, for example by vendor, family, version, or identifier. The values are relatively free-form and must be looked up in the documentation of the extensions that provide them. Today, only the Copilot Chat extension contributes chat models. It uses the copilot vendor and current families are gpt-3.5-turbo and gpt-4 but are subject to change.
The Java extension for VS Code is already using the Language Model API to provide Copilot-based rewrite capabilities for your Java code. Learn more about these updates in the Java in Visual Studio Code May 2024 blog post.
To aid with developing GitHub Copilot extensions for VS Code, we've developed and published a TSX-based library for declaring complex prompts and converting them to chat messages, subject to your LLM's context window limits. In developing this, we took inspiration from Anysphere's priompt library. If you're an extension author who is planning to use the chat and language model APIs, consider trying out the latest alpha release of this library: @vscode/prompt-tsx.
It is also possible to extend GitHub Copilot by contributing a GitHub App. This GitHub App can contribute a chat participant in the Chat view, which you can invoke with @. A GitHub App is backed by a service and works across all GitHub Copilot surfaces, such as github.com, Visual Studio, or VS Code. GitHub Apps do not have full access to the VS Code API. To extend GitHub Copilot through a GitHub App, you should join the Copilot Partner Program. You can learn more by watching the Extending GitHub Copilot talk we delivered at the Microsoft Build conference.
VS Code now exposes what stack frame and thread are focused in the Debug view via a new API. vscode.debug.activeStackItem retrieves what stack item (thread or stack frame) is currently focused, and vscode.debug.onDidChangeActiveStackItem is an event that fires when that changes.
Previously, test runs that were triggered by extensions would never move focus into the Test Results view in the same way that UI-initiated runs did. This behavior is now configurable via a preserveFocus flag that can be set when creating a TestRunRequest. This flag defaults to true to maintain backwards compatibility.
d3342ee215