Visual Studio Code

Description

In April 2015, Microsoft stood in front of the developer audience at its Build conference and announced a new code editor — free, cross-platform, running on Windows, macOS and Linux. For a company that had spent decades developing Windows-only, premium-priced developer tools, the announcement had a different tone altogether.

The project started small. A team of about ten engineers, with startup-level autonomy within Microsoft, developed Visual Studio Code on the Electron framework. They took the Monaco editor component that Microsoft had already developed for Azure DevOps and added language intelligence, debugging, and extension support, and opened the source code under the MIT license in November 2015. The binary product is shipped under a separate Microsoft Software License which allows for telemetry collection — a distinction that is important to users who desire the open source version without Microsoft’s data collection, and that the VSCodium project addresses by distributing telemetry-free builds.

In the 2016 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, VS Code ranked 13th in the list of development tools with 7 percent of respondents using it. Two years later it was in first place with 35 percent. It has been in that spot every year since, with the 2025 survey finding 75.9 percent of more than 49,000 respondents — more than double its nearest alternative. Microsoft hit 50 million VS Code users in 2025.

THE EDITOR

The core editing experience revolves around IntelliSense, VS Code’s system for code completion, parameter hints, and documentation hover. Out of the box, IntelliSense works for JavaScript, TypeScript, JSON, HTML and CSS. Language server extensions bring the same intelligence to Python, Go, Rust, Java, C++, PHP, and dozens of others by implementing the Language Server Protocol — a standard that VS Code introduced and that other editors later adopted.

Syntax highlighting, bracket matching, code folding, and multi-cursor editing are built-in. The minimap shows a high-level overview of the file in addition to the editor. The command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P on Windows and Linux, Cmd+Shift+P on macOS) gives access to all editor functions by name, so the keyboard is a complete navigation tool even for operations with no default shortcut.

The integrated terminal is executed within the editor window, eliminating the need to switch to a separate application for shell commands. Users can open several terminals in split panes, switch between shells, and connect terminal output to error lines in the editor. The built-in debugger includes breakpoints, step-through execution, variable inspection, and call stack navigation. Debug configurations are stored in a launch.json file within the project, so teams have the same setup via version control.

GIT AND SOURCE CONTROL

Git integration comes built in, not as an extension. The Source Control sidebar displays changed files, staged changes, and commit history. Users can stage individual lines in a file, not entire files, write commit messages, push, pull, and resolve merge conflicts from within the editor. The diff editor displays added, removed, and changed lines side by side or inline.

Third-party source control providers — SVN, Mercurial, Perforce — connect via extensions that implement the same Source Control Provider API.

REMOTE DEVELOPMENT

VS Code’s Remote Development extensions enable users to connect to a remote machine and edit code as if it were running locally. The Remote-SSH extension establishes a connection to any server accessible via SSH. VS Code runs its server component on the remote machine and only sends the UI to the local one. Remote-WSL does the same thing for Windows Subsystem for Linux, allowing Windows users to run Linux toolchains without having to run a separate virtual machine. The Dev Containers extension runs the editor’s server in a Docker container, enabling teams to define complete development environments in a devcontainer.json file that can be reproduced in a single step by any team member.

GitHub Codespaces takes this to the next level and spins up a development environment in a remote VM that developers can access via VS Code or via the browser.

GITHUB COPILOT

GitHub Copilot is an extension for VS Code and, as of late 2024 and 2025, comes as a free tier with monthly usage limits. The extension offers inline completions that recommend whole lines or functions as the user types. The Copilot Chat panel takes natural language queries about code, explains functions, generates unit tests, and suggests refactors. Agent mode, which Microsoft has been expanding dramatically through 2024 and 2025, enables Copilot to perform multi-step tasks: if a high-level instruction is given, the agent will edit files, run terminal commands, read the output of tests, and self-correct until the task is completed or requires input from the user. Multiple agent sessions can be running in parallel.

In July 2025, Microsoft open-sourced the GitHub Copilot Chat extension, making the chat-based coding assistant implementation fully available to the developer community, including agent mode. The extension provides support for Model Context Protocol servers, which enable agents to connect to external data sources and tools via a standard interface.

VSCODE.DEV AND WEB ACCESS

Microsoft has a browser-based version of VS Code at vscode.dev. The web version opens local files using the browser’s File System Access API, and connects to remote GitHub and Azure repositories. It supports the same editing features and most of the extensions with web-compatible implementations. Developers use it for quick edits without a local installation, or to access their code from a machine where installing software is not possible.

VS Code Insiders delivers daily builds of new features to come, allowing developers and early adopters to try out changes before they hit the stable monthly release.

LICENSING AND TELEMETRY

The binary VS Code product collects usage data by default, and sends it to Microsoft. Users can turn off most telemetry in Settings, although the license says that not all data collection can be disabled. The underlying source code, available at github.com/microsoft/vscode, is published under the MIT license. Because the handling of telemetry in VS Code is visible in the open source code, it is inspectable rather than opaque in its behavior.