You’d think v and v would merge into one at some point, but who knows. Instead, you can quickly look at a GitHub repo.īut perhaps even more notably, you can make changes, save the files, then use the Source Control panel right there to commit the code or make a pull request. You don’t have the opportunity here to open a local folder. You also get VS Code in the browser if you go to v, but it’s not quite wired up the same. v: The whole “Press Period (.) on any GitHub Repo” Thing Even stuff like “Find in Project” seems just as fast as local, even on large sites.

There is some very explicit permission-granting you have to do, and keyboard commands are a bit weird as you’re having to fight the browsers keyboard commands. I haven’t worked a full day in it or anything, but basic usage seems about the same. It can open your local folders and it behaves largely just like your local VS Code app does. If it does work, it’s basically… VS Code in the browser. It’s just Edge and Chrome that have this API right now, but even if you can’t get it, you can still upload files, or perhaps more usefully, open a repo. This simple gateway to the local machine quickly opens some interesting scenarios for using VS Code for the Web as a zero-installation local development tool Modern browsers that support the File System Access API (Edge and Chrome today) allow web pages to access the local file system (with your permission).

It was just a few weeks ago as I write that Microsoft dropped v. It’s actually kind of confusing all the different places this shows up, so let’s look at the landscape as I see it today. Availability on the web means being able to use it without installing software, which is significant for places, like schools, where managing all that is a pain, and computers, like Chromebooks, where you don’t really install local software at all.

I’d say it’s kind of a big deal, as VS Code isn’t just some editor it’s the predominant editor used by web developers. That’s starting to shift, though, as there has been an absolute explosion of places VS Code is becoming available to use on the web. VS Code is built from web technologies (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript), but dare I say today it’s mostly used a local app that’s installed on your machine.

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