Microsoft has released Visual Studio Code 1.85, aka the November 2023 edition of the company’s signature open source code editor. This latest update to Visual Studio Code features floating editor windows and the ability to visualize JavaScript heap snapshots.
Introduced December 7, Visual Studio Code 1.85 can be downloaded for Windows, Linux, or Mac.
With the new release, developers can move editors out of the main window into their own lightweight windows. Changes to an editor in one window will immediately apply to all other editor windows. To create a floating editor window, users can drag an editor out of the current window and drop it into an empty space on the desktop. New commands also are available to move or copy editors or editor groups into their own windows.
V8 heap snapshots saved as .heapsnapshot now can be visualized in Visual Studio Code, both in a traditional tabular view and in a graphical representation of the retainers of a given memory object. Heap snapshots can be captured via the Take Performance Profile command while debugging JavaScript code, and they can be captured via the Memory tab in browser DevTools.
Visual Studio Code 1.85 follows Visual Studio Code 1.84, which arrived November 1 and featured audio cues, and two subsequent point release updates, versions 1.84.1 and 1.84.2.
Other new features and improvements in Visual Studio Code 1.85:
- To improve the keyboard experience, tooltips now are shown on keyboard focus for items with custom hovers such as Activity Bar and Status Bar items.
- Types in JavaScript and TypeScript inlay hints now are interactive.
- Developers now can choose which extensions to auto-update.
- Developers also now can more conveniently navigate through Python projects’ type relationships when using the Pylance language server. This can be helpful when using large codebases with complex type relationships.
- An Incoming/Outgoing section has been introduced in the Source Control section to display incoming and outgoing changes for the current branch compared to its remote.
- For the GitHub Copilot AI developer tool, the inline chat prompt history now is persisted across VS Code sessions.
- Sticky Scroll has been been extended to all tree views, enabling users to more easily navigate project trees. This feature is in preview.
- A multi-diff editor, also in preview, allows users to view changes in multiple files in one scrollable view.
