Visual Studio Code March 2021 Update

There are a number of updates in this update of Visual Studio Code March update version 1.55 that will be liked by most of the users. We will checkout some of the interesting points in this post today.

Improved Integrated Terminal

The terminal now supports defined profiles, which appear in the terminal's dropdown, to conveniently launch non-default shells

Below image shows the list of all supported terminals in latest version of VS Code, you can check this in terminals dropdown and select as per your preferences.

You can also add new or edit existing terminal profiles by using the terminal.integrated.profiles.<platform> setting.

Below is the example for doing so:

"terminal.integrated.profiles.windows": {
  // Add a PowerShell profile that doesn't run the profile
  "PowerShell (No Profile)": {
      // Some sources are available which auto detect complex cases
      "source": "PowerShell",
      "args": ["-NoProfile"],
      // Name the terminal "PowerShell (No Profile)" to differentiate it
      "overrideName": true
  },
  // Remove the builtin Git Bash profile
  "Git Bash": null,
  // Add a Cygwin profile
  "Cygwin": {
    "path": "C:\\cygwin64\\bin\\bash.exe",
    "args": ["--login"]
  }
}

Seamless Terminal Relaunching

VS Code have introduced automatic relaunching of terminals when an extension wants to change the environment. The team now states that they have solved flickering issue of terminals that was caused before when the relaunch occurs.

There is also a new setting to disable this automatic relaunching all together terminal.integrated.environmentChangesRelaunch.

Multi-cursor support

They have added initial screen reader support for multiple cursors. Whenever a new cursor is added, VS Code now announces it along with the cursor line and column position.

VS Code also announces when secondary cursors have been removed. They plan to further improve multi-cursor accessibility as they receive feedback by users.

Screen Reader limit Improved

They have increased the number of lines that a "Say All" command can read. Previously, VS Code had a hard limit of 100 lines that could be announced by a screen reader at one time, and now increased this limit to 1000.

Note: The editor.accessibilityPageSize is now deprecated but team says they will carry out this feature in some of the future releases. 

Emmet

The emmet.extensionsPath setting now takes in only string arrays, and can be directly edited in the Settings editor.

Search in Open Editors

New feature has been introduced that will Search Only in Open Editors checkbox in a workspace search to change from searching the entire workspace to only searching in files that have been opened in editor tabs

In the previous versions this was enabled via an opt-in, but in this update they've enhanced the behavior with files that have not yet been loaded in the VS Code session and enabled it by default which makes productivity more efficient.

Debugging

There are couple of Improvements to features for user who debug directly from Visual Studio code

VS Code now have Inline menu to edit conditions and hit count. It now show's an inline menu for editing conditions and hit counts for function breakpoints. 

In the previous versions the inline edit button would choose automatically what condition to edit. The menu make's the flow easier and give more control to the user.

Debugger Adapter Control: The stopped event can now report the breakpoints that were hit. An optional attribute hitBreakpointIds has been added to the stopped event that contains the IDs of the breakpoints that triggered the event.

If you want to checkout the complete list of changes for this version you can checkout the official page here

Happy Coding!