Source code editor Visual Studio Code introduces individual profiles
Microsoft has released the January release of Visual Studio Code. As in previous years, the free editor, which is based on open source, deviates from the usual monthly release cycle at the start of the year, since there is traditionally no December release.
What’s new in Visual Studio Code 1.75 include profiles for different usage scenarios, accessibility improvements, and default signed extensions from the marketplace. There are also a few comfort improvements in the editor and in the workbench.
A question of profile
The newly introduced profiles are used to customize the editor for various purposes such as developing in different programming languages, working in the Jupyter Notebook or writing documentation. You can also use your own profile for demonstration purposes or lectures, which is designed with light mode and larger fonts for good legibility.
Visual Studio Code saves the general settings, extensions, keyboard shortcuts and user snippets in the profiles. The profiles can be exported in order to pass them on to new team members or participants in a workshop. Anyone who receives a profile can first view it in the web version of the editor for preview purposes before importing it.
Profiles individually store the settings for scenarios such as work and demo.
(Image: Microsoft)
Fewer barriers
A few innovations should improve the accessibility of the editor. So the one with Shift | Tab enabled new Terminal Accessibility Mode for navigating a screen reader through the terminal’s buffer using buttons. Old | F1 calls up a help window in the terminal with the most important commands for the combination of screen reader and keyboard navigation.
The Workspace Trust introduced in version 1.57, which developers use to set whether they trust the code in a folder, can now also be operated using buttons.
More comfort for the workbench
The interface brings some comfort improvements. Among other things, the size of several views within the workbench can now be changed simultaneously by dragging the common corners. The team also reworked the preferences menu and the grid layout.
In addition, there are adjustments to the search within tree views. It now offers navigation through the search history using the arrow keys. In addition, a button toggles between the previously standard fuzzy matching and the new contiguous (connected) matching. The latter variant only searches for the exact sequence of letters, while the former method also finds terms in which the letters are not directly next to each other.
Clicking on the button next to the search field determines whether “src” only finds the exact sequence or, as before, also “resource”, for example.
(Image: Microsoft)
Signature in the marketplace
Since November, all extensions on the Visual Studio Marketplace have received automatic code signing. When installing extensions, the editor checks the signatures to make sure they actually come from the marketplace. If you create your own extensions, you don’t have to take any action.
The so-called publisher signing, in which the authors of extensions take care of the signing themselves and only allow certain certificates, is still up for debate. The procedure is intended to ensure that nobody can use a hacked marketplace account to publish malicious code under the name of a trustworthy account.
Of course, code signing does not generally prevent the publication of malicious code. Recently, security researchers found that fake extensions are easy to disguise.
Other new features such as the integration of the additional parameter for the stash command introduced in Git 2.35 and the documentation for including the extension for AI tools, which is currently limited to GitHub Copilot, can be found in the Visual Studio Code 1.75 announcement.
(rme)
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