What is Visual Studio Code?

Visual Studio Code (famously known as VS Code) is a free open source text editor by Microsoft. VS Code is available for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Although the editor is relatively lightweight, it includes some powerful features that have made VS Code one of the most popular development environment tools in recent times.

Features

VS Code supports a wide array of programming languages from Java, C++, and Python to CSS, Go, and Dockerfile. Moreover, VS Code allows you to add on and even creating new extensions including code linters, debuggers, and cloud and web development support.

The VS Code user interface allows for a lot of interaction compared to other text editors. To simplify user experience, VS Code is divided into five main regions:

• The activity bar
• The side bar
• Editor groups
• The panel
• The status bar

The image below shows how these regions are displayed:

Getting started

You can install the latest version of Visual Studio Code from their official website.

After installation, you can run the editor by entering the code -n command into the terminal. This will prompt VS Code to start and display a fresh instance. If you want to continue working from where you left off in the previous coding session, enter the code command without the -n flag. If you want to open VS Code in a certain directory, navigate to the directory and enter the code -r command. You are now on your way to writing​ powerful code on your VS Code environment!