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InfoQ Homepage News Visual Studio Code 1.29 Improves Search, Debug, and More

Visual Studio Code 1.29 Improves Search, Debug, and More

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Visual Studio Code October 2018 release, numbered 1.29, introduces a number of significant new features, while confirming Visual Studio Code trend as the most used text editor in the JavaScript ecosystem.

Below are some of the most significant improvements in version 1.29:

  • Search: your regular expression can now span over multiple lines by including the \n character. Additionally, regex searches now support backreferences and lookahed, with lookbehind planned for a future release. Lookahead allows you to build regexes that match, for example, HTML tags opening and closing: <([a-z]*)></\1>(?=<) will match <body></body>. Additionally, the new search.useReplacePreview setting allows developers to disable the preview diff that appear when doing search/replace operation.

  • Debugging: to improve call stack readability, it is now possible to collapse all stack frames not referring to user code, such as external code, skipped files, etc. Additionally, each debug session shows now its output in a separate debug console, which helps to distinguish which message comes from where. Traces can now be styled when debugging Node.js or Chrome.

  • Workbench: macOS Mojave dark mode is now better supported along with full screen. The new workbench.editor.highlightModifiedTabs allows to highlight files that need to be saved through a thick top border of the corresponding editor tab. Additionally, the new breadcrumbs.symbolSortOrder setting controls whether symbols in the Breadcrumb picker are ordered or not.

  • Terminal: when you create a split terminal, you can now control whether it inherits the current working directory of its parent terminal using the terminal.integrated.splitCwd setting (inherited, only available on macOS), starts with the workspace root (workspaceRoot), or uses the initial working directory of its parent (initial). Additionally, cmd-backspace on macOS will delete the whole line from the start to the current insertion point.

Visual Studio Code 1.29 includes support for TypeScript 3.1.4 and improves support for other languages, including CSS, Markdown, etc.

On a related note, minor version 1.29.1 of Visual Studio Code has already been released to fix a number of bugs.

As mentioned, the latest “State of JavaScript” survey shows that Visual Studio Code popularity is increasing ever more and sets it firmly above Sublime Text and Vim.


(Image from 2018.stateofjs.com)

There are many more new features in Visual Studio Code 1.29 that we cannot cover here, so do not miss the official announcement for full details.

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