Microsoft: New VS Code update is out – plus here's what GitHub Codespaces will cost
Microsoft has released a new update of its Visual Studio Code (VS Code) code editor for Windows, Windows on Arm, macOS and Linux.
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The latest update brings VS Code to version 1.51, which contains fixes for "housekeeping GitHub issues" that have emerged since GitHub Codespaces was released.
Microsoft in September aired its plans to kill off Visual Studio Codespaces – the rebranded version of Visual Studio Online – and merge it with GitHub's take on the online code-editing service, GitHub Codespaces.
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Microsoft opted to consolidate Visual Studio Codespaces with GitHub Codespaces to "eliminate confusion, simplify the experience for everyone, and make more rapid progress to address customer feedback".
Visual Studio Codespaces users have until February 2021 to move to GitHub Codespaces. After that, the Visual Studio Codespaces offering on Azure will end.
The VS Code team said it has "worked with our partners at GitHub on GitHub Codespaces, which ended up being more involved than originally anticipated".
The team says it will continue working on GitHub housekeeping for part of the November iteration of VS Code.
Microsoft unveiled GitHub Codespaces in May, offering developers a cloud-hosted development environment that launches quickly inside GitHub so that developers can start contributing to projects immediately.
It offers developers a containerized, browser-based version of the VS Code editor, but developers can also opt to use their desktop IDEs instead to start a codespace in GitHub and connect to it from their desktops via VS Code.
Codespaces in GitHub supports VS Code's code completion and navigation, extensions, and terminal access.
GitHub Codespaces is still in a limited public beta. It's described as an "integrated development environment (IDE) on GitHub". During the beta phase, GitHub Codespaces is free to use. However, when it becomes generally available, users will be billed for storage and compute resources.
GitHub has now listed pricing details that will apply when GitHub Codespaces reaches general availability.
The 'basic' Linux package with two CPU cores, 4GB of RAM, and 32GB of SSD storage costs $0.085 per hour. The 'standard' option with four CPU cores, 8GB of RAM, 32GB of SSD costs $0.169 per hour, whole the 'premium' option with eight CPU cores, 16GB of RAM, 32GB of SSD costs $0.339 per hour.
Additionally, each codespace incurs monthly storage costs until users delete the codespace. Storage costs for all instance types are $0.10 per GB per month.
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The proposed pricing is consistent with the recently discounted prices of instances for Visual Studio Codespaces in Azure, which was basically halved.
Besides GitHub housekeeping, Microsoft has introduced more prominent pinned tabs for the VS Code workbench, a custom hover for extension trees, and the ability to install a VS Code extension without synchronizing it while settings sync is enabled.
Users can also now move the cursor while suggestions are showing, allowing users to trigger suggestions at the end of a word, move left to see more suggestions, and then use replace to overwrite the word.