Timeline feature previewed! Visual Studio Code 1.42 update summary

Hello,
I'm Mandai, the Wild Team member of the development team.

This month, we received an update for VSCode (hereinafter referred to as Visual Studio Code), so I would like to introduce some of the features that I personally found most appealing

Unsaved editor behavior is now much better

I would like to see a feature implemented soon that stores data even when it is unsaved, but it seems that this is still a long way off (and there are no plans for such a feature)

There are two improvements this time

First of all, the editor title "untitled" now displays the beginning of the content, making it easier to identify.
You may wonder how many times you'll open an editor with "untitled", but this is the first improvement.

The other is an improvement to the behavior of the default language mode

For example, I set the default language mode to Markdown
because I want to be able to take notes immediately when I want to.

That's fine if you just want to take notes, but if you want to copy the contents of a file, this setting becomes a hindrance

A new option has been added: you can set the string ${activeEditorLanguage} to create an editor with the language mode set to the same as the language mode of the editor that was previously open

The code is in TypeScript, but the configuration file is a json file, a yaml file, or maybe even .env, so it's common to choose the most appropriate file format depending on the content, and if you often have a mixture of various file formats, I think this setting is fine

This setting can be set for each workspace, so you can set ${activeEditorLanguage} for your development workspace, and if you're creating a workspace for taking notes like me, set it to Markdown, and you'll probably be even more efficient if you do that

 

Panels can now be moved to the left side of the editor

Previously, this panel could be moved to the right (as I recall), but now it can also be moved to the left

This panel also includes a terminal, which is very useful when viewing logs with less (although it would be nice to have it on the right side)

You'd like to be able to quickly move panels like this with shortcut keys, but although the shortcuts themselves are set, they are not assigned to keys, so you'll need to set them yourself.
Try searching for " workbench.action.positionPanelLeft " and assigning it.

 

Rename preview feature added

One of the tasks that requires careful consideration when refactoring is changing class names.
It is best to avoid changing them if possible, but I think it is common for class names to become mismatched with their actual meanings after subdividing classes.

It would be great if the test could successfully pick up any oversights, but that doesn't always work, so it's a task that requires quite a bit of courage

In such cases, using Rename Preview will display a list of all occurrences of the class in the project, which will likely reduce the chances of missing something

However, this feature seems to depend on the IntelliSense implementation and the Language Server implementation.
After a quick search, I found that JavaScript and TypeScript are supported by default, but for other languages, it only works if IntelliSense is supported.

 

You can now set the maximum number of editors open

It depends on the Language Server you are using and the size of the content, but generally one editor uses more than 50MB of memory, so if you open 20 editors, it will consume about 1GB of memory

If you add a development environment to that, memory will run out in no time

Therefore, a feature has been added to set the limit for the number of editors that can be opened in VSCode.
Using this, it is now possible to limit the memory used by VSCode to some extent.

• workbench.editor.limit.enabled
• workbench.editor.limit.perEditorGroup
• workbench.editor.limit.value

The above three setting items have been added, so let's check the role of each

First, workbench.editor.limit.enabled is an option that enables or disables the editor limit setting.
By default, it is set to off.

Next is workbench.editor.limit.perEditorGroup.
This is an option that determines whether the maximum number of editors is applied per editor group or to the entire editor group. Setting it
per editor group seems more like a control to prevent editor tabs from becoming too small than a resource limit.

Finally, workbench.editor.limit.value is the maximum number of open editors, which
defaults to 10.

 

New features are being unveiled one after another in the Insiders Edition

The Timeline feature, as specified in the current milestone, is now in preview

This is a feature that allows you to check the commit history on a file-by-file basis, making it easy to check the past modification history for each file, which was previously difficult to track using gitlens' commit history

It seems that the timeline API has already been added and can be used by extensions

The search function will also be completely revamped, and the new search function will appear as an editor rather than being displayed in a sidebar or panel

The biggest difference I've noticed is that the search results are displayed in the editor, so you can output them as a file. I
've always felt that not being able to save multiple search results wasn't an inconvenience, but now that I think about it, it would be better if you could save them.

The editor allows for a much greater degree of freedom in expression, and I found it very easy to read.
Also, there are links that take you directly to the search results, so the experience is almost the same as before.

The above features are not available on the official site, but are available on Insiders

 

summary

It seemed like there were a lot of new settings-related features added this time, but what do you think?
There are also some clever little features added, such as specifying the default behavior when a conflict occurs when saving, and the ability to highlight code-folded lines, which I wasn't able to cover due to space constraints, so please give them a try.

Visual Studio Code Insiders is positioned as a feature evaluation version, and it allows you to try out exciting new features in the future, such as the timeline and new search functions, so it's fun to install and try them out.

I was really confused for a moment. I was
so distracted by the twins that I didn't even look at the product, but 4,600 yen?

That's all