Visual Studio Code’s October update has arrived with new features. The source code editor now offers TypeScript 3.7 support, an activity bar indicator for the workbench, and more. The VS Code team also did some November “spring cleaning” and took care of thousands of GitHub issues.
Microsoft have released the monthly VS Code update. Version 1.40 was built using TypeScript 3.7, which was released this week, and enables new language features like optional chaining. In order to use v3.7 features, you need the JavaScript and TypeScript Nightly extension, available in the Extension Marketplace.
VS Code 1.40 is referred to as a “housekeeping iteration”, as the team focused on issues and pull requests on GitHub. Altogether, they closed 4,622 issues by either triaging or fixing them. Check out the interactive VS Code Issue Tracker by Benjamin Lannon to see how the journey has been going.
Now, let’s have a look at some of the highlights in VS Code 1.40.
by Manfred Steyer (SOFTWAREarchitekt.at)
Terminal updates
The terminal received some new features in this release, one of which is fast scroll support. Just hold Alt
while scrolling with the mouse wheel. Scroll speed is defined in the editor.fastScrollSensitivity setting.
Changing the rightClickBehavior setting to "terminal.integrated.rightClickBehavior": "paste”
will now allow you to paste in the terminal on right-click, while ,
, :
, and ;
are now used as separator characters when double-clicking to select a word.
Additionally, the terminal now includes chord support by default and command navigation from the scroll position.
Workbench color theme updates
If you’re always having trouble getting your bearings, you will enjoy this new feature: VS Code 1.40 adds an indicator for the active item and changes the inactive foreground colors to create a stronger contrast. You can also opt to use a background color for the active element.
Take a look at the new indicator in this gif:
And there’s more in terms of color changes. The VS Code window now allows you to add the window border colors window.activeBorder and window.inactiveBorder:
Other updates and bug fixes
Debugging, Git support, source control and other aspects of VS Code have received updates as well, and three notable bugs have been fixed. Terminal content in powershell/conpty should not go missing anymore when resizing, Markdown preview should now support dragging to start a new editor group and the Webview editor should appear in Open Previous Editor from the History command.
See the full release notes for more details on VS Code 1.40.
Author
Maika Möbus has been an editor for Software & Support Media since January 2019. She studied Sociology at Goethe University Frankfurt and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.