What is the philosophy behind the design of VS Code?
Overview of Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a source code editor built by Microsoft as an open-source project hosted on GitHub. It is designed for developers to build and debug modern web and cloud applications primarily using JavaScript, TypeScript, and Node.js technologies. Visual Studio Code is available for free for the Windows, Linux, and macOS platforms.
Philosophy behind the design of visual studio code
The main idea behind this code editor was to equip developers with simple, yet powerful, tooling that does not get in the way of developers; thus, enabling them to spend more time on executing their ideas rather than fiddling with their development environment.
The following were its key design goals:
Multi-platform
VS Code was built to run on all the popular platforms below:
- MacOS (version 10.10 and onwards )
- Windows (version 7,8 and 10 )
- Linux (including most of its popular distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE, and Fedora)
Editor centric
At the heart of Visual Studio Code lies a lightning-fast source code editor with the following features:
- Best in class code editing with syntax highlighting
- auto-indentation
- bracket-matching
- code block selection
- code snippets
- keyboard shortcuts
- debugging with breakpoints, call stacks
- interactive console
- etc.
Intelligent
Visual Studio has intelligent code completion features that understand code semantics. It provides supports for advanced features like code navigation and code refactoring.
Customizable
Visual Studio Code works “out of the box” with no configuration for web development. However, developers can install third-party extensions to richly customize their edit-build-debug experience. Extensions run as a separate process; hence they won’t slow down your editor, as is the case with other popular integrated developer environments (IDEs).
Simple, yet powerful
VS Code comes with a simple and intuitive layout to provide you with the best in class code editing experience and the ability to navigate through the full context of your project. It also provides built-in support for Git and various other Source Code Management. Reviewing diffs, staging files with your changes, and committing them is supported right from the editor. It can also push and pull code from various SCM or version control systems.
More information on Visual Studio Code, including its documentation and download and installation guide, can be found on their website.