VS Code / VS Codium

But actually VS Codium

VS Codium is the pure community distribution of VS Code. Despite the editor being mostly open, Microsoft inserts some creepy code into the packaged version which VS Codium excludes. Why and how you should migrate from Visual Studio Code to VSCodium.

# Ubuntu-esque
wget -qO - https://gitlab.com/paulcarroty/vscodium-deb-rpm-repo/raw/master/pub.gpg \
  | sudo apt-key add -
echo 'deb https://gitlab.com/paulcarroty/vscodium-deb-rpm-repo/raw/repos/debs/ vscodium main' \
  | sudo tee --append /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vscodium.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install codium
# Windows
choco install vscodium
# Mac
brew install --cask vscodium

This should work more or less identically to Microsoft’s version, except that Microsoft will know less stuff about you.

xdg-mime default code-insiders.desktop text/plain  # X
sudo update-alternatives --set editor (which code-insiders) #everywhere

VS Code install

There are some exceptions; does GitHub Copilot work in vs codium? 🤷‍♂️

In that case, one might want the mainline microsoft version. Just download that from the download page

Running Visual Studio Code on Linux mentions auto-update workflows, e.g. the following one for ubuntu:

wget -qO- https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | gpg --dearmor > packages.microsoft.gpg
sudo install -o root -g root -m 644 packages.microsoft.gpg /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64,arm64,armhf signed-by=/etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/packages.microsoft.gpg] https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/code stable main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vscode.list'
rm -f packages.microsoft.gpg
sudo apt update
sudo apt install code # or code-insiders

On pop os there is already a packaged version of VS Code which you can install from the Pop!shop app.

Browser

Simple Browser: Show runs a minimalist local browser.

A full-blown dev server with sophisticated integration is available in the Live Server Extension.

Multiple Windows

This sorta works. tl;dr Use the command Duplicate workspace in new window.

Searching

Almost obvious but to get maximum value you have to learn a couple of extra things.

Multiline search expressions require you to type ⇧-⏎/Shift-Enter. That’s for vanilla string matching. For regex matching if I want to match multiline search I need to explicitly add newline characters to your character classes, i.e. [\s\S\r]+. NB I think this has changed now?

To replace regex groups you do the usual thing - $1 is the first group etc and $$ is a dollar sign. Putting this together, if you wished to replace latex equation bracket syntax with latex dollar syntax, you would replace

\\\[ *([\s\S\r]+?) *\\\]

with

$$$$$1$$$$

🤢

VS code does ordinary javascript regex. If I want fancy lookaround or backref I can enable the setting search.usePCRE2.

Multi cursors interact with search usefully. General multiple cursors are made by Alt+Click/ Option+click. There are many keyboard shortcuts to use them to automate menial chores.

Python

See VS Code Python.

Cursors, navigating, selection

There are many useful shortcuts for navigating/selecting. And you can add more obvs. Some are worth knowing; I mentionen them belwo with their default keybindings.

Shift Alt i inserts a cursor at the end of every line in the current selection

Ctrl/Command Alt Arrow to add cursor above, or down arrow to add cursor below.

Ctrl+Shift+L is supposed to add a cursor at every occurrence of the current selected text, but it does not for me unless I am in search mode.

Ctrl Shift Arrow selects by word.

Ctrl Alt - moves cursor to where it was before.

F4/Shift F4 to navigate to global search results. F3 for local.

Important keyboard shortcuts

Tab switching is not obvious. There are a lot of tweaks you could do, but short story: Ctrl PageDown (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ ⌥ → (Mac). Pane/editor switch is not obvious either: ⌘ 1, ⌘ 2 work.

LaTeX

See VS Code for LaTeX.

python

There is a python extension which is more or less mandatory since python is in so many things these days. The fancy new Pylance which adds non-trivial improvements like type checking.

ext install ms-python.python
ext install ms-python.vscode-pylance

Misc extensions of interest

Networked VS Code

Here be tips for using VS Code as a collaborative cloud-friendly editor.

// @sync os=linux host=work-pc
// @sync os=mac host=home-pc

Editing prose

See VS Code for prose.

Visualize weird stuff

A visual watch window that lets you visualize your data structures while debugging.p

vs code data preview is a tabular data visualiser/analyser for vs code.

Various config one needs

You config is in a JSON file, which is quaintly retro but does mean that 3rd party config is at least not purely abysmal. The location is the following:

• Windows %APPDATA%\Code\User\settings.json
• Mac ~/Library/Application Support/Code/User/settings.json
• Linux ~/.config/Code/User/settings.json

But you can coordinate across OSes by using settings sync.

  "editor.hover.delay": 3000,

  "editor.hover.sticky": false,

  "editor.acceptSuggestionOnEnter": false,
  "editor.acceptSuggestionOnCommitCharacter": false,

  "editor.autoClosingBrackets": false,

    "symbolOutline.topLevel": [
        "Class",
        "Module",
        "Constructor",
        "Function",
        "Method"
    ]

    "files.associations": {
        "*.jsx": "javascript",
        "*.rst": "restructuredtext",
        "*.Rmd": "markdown",
        "*.Rpres": "markdown",
        "*.Rnw": "latex",
        "*.jmd": "markdown"
    },

    "telemetry.enableTelemetry": false

Jupyter

One can use VS Code as an alternative client to talk to jupyter kernels.

The extension to use here is VS code Juptyer. Check its nifty examples.

This is now supported by Microsoft. See VS Code for Python.

Bonus tips/gotchas

git editor

It is convenient to set code as editor for git commits:

git config --global core.editor "code-insiders --wait"  # insiders

set -U fish_user_yaths \
    "/Applications/Visual Studio Code.app/Contents/Resources/app/bin" \
    $fish_user_paths