Visual Studio Code 1.80, the latest edition of the popular code editor from Microsoft, stabilizes Remote Tunnels to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) instances. Remote Tunnels lets you connect securely to a remote machine from a VS Code client without requiring SSH.
Stabilization of the previously previewed capability to connect to WSL over Remote Tunnels enables connections directly from the Remote Explorer. WSL lets developers run a GNU/Linux environment directly on Windows. Remote Tunnels to WSL works on VS Code desktop and vscode.dev.
Elsewhere in VS Code 1.80, the update also improved editor group and tab resizing, A new setting, workbench.editor.doubleClickTabToToggleEditorGroupSizes, disables toggling the size of an editor group from maximized to restored when double-clicking a tab of that group. Another new setting, workbench.editor.tabSizingFixedMinWidth, controls the minimum size of a tab when workbench.editor.tabSizing is set to fixed. A new value for the workbench.editor.splitSizing setting called auto is the new default. In this mode, splitting an editor group distributes available size evenly to all groups only if none of the editor groups has been resized. Otherwise, the space of the split group is divided in half and put in the new editor group.
Announced July 6, Visual Studio Code 1.80, aka the June 2023 release, can be downloaded for Windows, Linux, and macOS from the project website. Other new features and improvements in VS Code 1.80:
- Commands for Expand and Shrink now can be configured to skip subwords.
- For accessibility, an Open Command (Alt+F2) lets screen readers inspect content character by character.
- Support has been added for new link formats, including links that need to scan upwards in order to find the file and links.
- Images in the terminal, previously in preview, now are enabled by default.
- TypeScript 5.2 support is previewed.
- A Mypy type checker extension is available to provide type-checking support for Python using the mypy Python linter.
- A new Python debugger extension has been created, called Debugpy, which is separate from the Python extension. This extension resulted from a situation in which users were unable to upgrade a codebase and could not debug applications with the latest version of the Python extension when support was removed for Python 2.7 and Python 3.6 in the Python extension.