Microsoft announced the launch of Visual Studio Code, a lightweight cross-platform code editor for writing modern web and cloud applications that will run on OS X, Linux, and Windows.

Visual Studio Code has syntax highlighting for dozens of languages, the usual suspects like CoffeeScript, Python, Ruby, Jade, Clojure, Java, C++, R, Go, makefiles, shell scripts, PowerShell, bat, XML, you get the idea. It has more than just autocomplete (everyone has that, eh?) it has real IntelliSense. It also as IntelliSense for single files like HTML, CSS, LESS, SASS, and Markdown. There’s a huge array of languages that Visual Studio Code supports.

The real power of this editor is its project IntelliSense for C#, TypeScript, JavaScript/node, JSON, etc. For example, when an ASP.NET 5 application is being edited in Visual Studio Code, the IntelliSense is provided by the open source projects Roslyn and OmniSharp. This means you get actual intelligent refactoring, navigation, and lots more. Visual Studio Code’s support for TypeScript is amazing because it has JavaScript and TypeScript at its heart.

Visual Studio Code has git support, diffs, interesting extensibility models through gulp, and is is a great debugger for JavaScript and Nodejs apps. They are also working on debugging support for things like the .NET Core CLR and Mono on all platforms.

This a code-focused and code-optimized lightweight tool, not a complete IDE. There’s no File | New Project or visual designers. If you live and work in the command line, you’ll want to check free tool out.

What I Like Most 🙂

  1. Fast like Flash 😉 – I love how fast this tool is. It opens fast, edits fast, debugs fast, navigates fast.
  2. Devs Most Like feature, Debugging – awesome, fast, and easy debugging of server-side JavaScript and C#
  3. Intellisense – C#, TypeScript and even for JavaScript and JSON … not to mention autocomplete and hints
  4. Git integration (Ohh Great) – super helpful to be able to integrate with git, show diffs, stage, commit, clean
  5. Refactoring – tons of features that make refactoring easy and fast
  6. Task running – I can run gulp and other tasks directly from VSCode
  7. Autosave (must needed) – love it!
  8. Go to symbol, file, task, whatever! – VSCode makes it a keystroke away to find anything you want to do
  9. Customization – I can customize key bindings, tasks, editor settings – pretty much everything
  10. Quick Fix – Learn CMD+. … when you see a light bulb, VSCode is giving you a hint that you can refactor this, and it will offer suggestions on how!
  11. Multi-instance – I can open many instances and toggle between different projects

 

You can also follow Visual Studio Code on Twitter at @code And Download Visual Studio Code.

Image credit – Hanselman
cross-platform tools