Visual Studio Code 1.29 Release Summary: Search Enhancements

Hello.
This is Mandai, the wild one on the development team.
The monthly Visual Studio Code (VSCode) update has arrived.
It seems my articles aren't a monthly occurrence, though...

I thought there seemed to be a lot of topics this month, so I counted them up, and there were 61 major topics listed in the release notes alone!

This time we're offering a huge amount of features, so although we won't be introducing all of them, we've carefully selected some features that you'll want to use!

Search-related enhancements

You can now search using regular expressions that span line breaks, which was not possible before!

It's strange that this feature hasn't been supported until now, but it's the highlight feature mentioned in the first topic

Other improvements include the ability to use backreferences within regular expressions and the ability to look up code beforehand.
While server-side developers don't typically use these features, they are powerful tools for inspecting HTML files.
Conversely, this update should have a significant impact on front-end developers.

If you're interested, a setting called search.usePCRE2 has been added to enable the PCRE2 engine, so try enabling it!

New features include search.showLineNumbers, which adds line numbers to search results; search.useReplacePreview, which controls whether to open a preview when batch converting search results; and search.useGlobalIgnoreFiles, which excludes search results based on the contents of global files such as .gitignore and .ignore

 

Are you making use of breadcrumbs?

Perhaps it's a feature strongly pushed by the VS Code development team, but the breadcrumb trail has been enhanced.
Now, you can choose from three sorting orders for the breadcrumb trail: by appearance in the file, by name, or by symbol type.
This is the same as the sorting order for outlines.

Additionally, when selecting and opening a file from the breadcrumb trail, clicking with the middle mouse button will open it in a new tab that will not be reused.
This setting conflicts with `workbench.editor.enablePreviewFromQuickOpen`, which prevents tab reuse.

By the way, the shortcut key to open the breadcrumb trail is " Ctrl + Shift + : ", so please try using that as well.

Using breadcrumbs frequently allows you to hide Explorer, which has the advantage of freeing up more horizontal workspace.
However, if you open the sidebar with " Ctrl + B " and shift focus to Explorer, you can't switch focus back to the editor. So, if you rely heavily on keyboard shortcuts, having to use the mouse to switch focus back is a significant drawback that can't be overlooked.

 

Insiders preview of Electron 3.0 released

Electron 3.0 includes an updated version of Chromium, version 66.
Furthermore, Node.js has also been updated to version 10.

By the way, even the stable version receives minor Electron version upgrades from time to time, and this update has upgraded it from 2.0.9 to 2.0.12

 

Writing CSS has become much easier

A feature called CSS Specificity has been added, making it easy to see if CSS is being applied correctly.
I've done this kind of verification countless times in my head, so it almost feels like nothing new, but while I understand my own CSS because I know my writing style, reading CSS written by others requires some getting used to.

In such cases, CSS Specificity may be useful

Another thing I still occasionally do is specify values ​​like 0px or 0%.
If the value is 0, you should just write 0; in fact, that's what you *must* write. It seems the software now properly flags these as warnings.
When I'm adjusting the value and it ends up being 0, I tend to forget the unit.

 

More shortcut keys have been added to make using the workbench more convenient

One of the biggest recent updates to the workbench is the ability to freely split the editor vertically and horizontally –the era of split editors has arrived! (Visual Studio Code 1.25 Release Summary | Beyond Inc. ) However, there are an incredible number of shortcut keys set up for the workbench.
And yet, most of them have no key assignments, which is a bit of a frustrating situation.

The Workbench, already overflowing with unassigned shortcuts, has yet another shortcut key added.
And, as expected, it has no key assignment!

To be honest, when it comes to the workbench, Ctrl + Q I only really use the Quick Open View, which is set to

Even if you assign your own keys, don't you think you can't help but worry that the key assignments will overlap with some incredibly useful feature that may be added in the future?

 

summary

Version 1.29 was packed with so many updates that I wondered, "Were there always this many?" What did you think?
Personally, there were so many features that I didn't understand that it took me a considerable amount of time to research them, but since I'm not particularly knowledgeable about creating VS Code extensions, about a third of the updates didn't directly affect me.

There are many updates related to debugging, but many of the features are only beneficial if you're developing with JavaScript/TypeScript, and it seems it will be a while before other languages ​​are included.
Since I currently mostly write PHP, I feel a bit left behind.

I recently read an article that said that globally, the most projects on Github are developed in JavaScript, and the popularity of JavaScript can be seen from VSCode's support for it

Looking at the new additions, I've been wanting to write some Node.js again lately

For me, the update is enough just to see some subtle improvements to the terminal I use frequently!

That's all