Visual Studio Code is an open source, lightweight, and full-featured text editor that supports a multitude of extensions for all kinds of developers. If you are getting started in the larger world of web development, Visual Studio Code can be a valuable tool. Features such as build scripts, environments, debugging, and more, combined with its role of powerful text editor, are of particular value to new developers. Visual Studio Code handles all this in one environment without the traditionally heavy integrated development environment (IDE).
Visual Studio Code is built on a platform called Electron, and is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. This learning will be as platform-independent as possible. Though some screenshots may be from specific platforms, the information should transfer to any platform with some minor adaptation (for example, shortcut key combinations).
Here’s a list of some of Visual Studio Code’s key features:
- Lightweight
- Multiplatform
- Color coding
- Built-in debugger
- Integrated terminal
- Integrated git support
- IntelliSense with autocomplete
- Open source
- Extensible
In this post, you will learn how to install and use Visual Studio Code with some basic web development extensions, then use these features to make a very simple web application. Even if you’ve never written a web app, you’ll still be successful with this post. And if you are an experienced web developer, you can still learn many useful things here to get you started with Visual Studio Code.
This post has only given an introduction, but you can continue with more tutorials to pick up on more and more features. For a fully detailed treatment of Visual Studio Code features, see the links provided below.