Visual Studio Code 1.62 brings workbench enhancements

Visual Studio Code 1.62, the latest monthly release of Microsoft’s popular code editor, is available with capabilities centering on areas such as the workbench and search icons.  

Published November 4, Visual Studio Code 1.62, aka the October 2021 release, is available for download for Windows, Linux, and Mac at the project website. The new features in Visual Studio 1.62 include:

• Accessibility improvements to the Settings editor include the editor scrolling back to the top after performing a search, so the user does not end up midway through search results and after each search. Also, more UI elements within the Settings editor have the setting ID as their name.
• Updates to search icons have been made so that they are now the same weight, while the match word icon is now more distinguishable from others.
• The parameter in the parameter hint is now highlighted and the color can be themed via editorHoverWidget.highlightForeground.
• Bracket pair guides have been improved, with horizontal lines now outlining the scope of a bracket pair. Vertical lines now depend on indentation of the code surrounded by the bracket pair. Further, bracket pairs now can be configured for a specific programming language through settings.
• Developers can choose between displaying IntelliSense hovers above or below the current line.
• Developers can configure how HTML atrributes are completed, via a html.completion.attributeDefaultValue setting.
• The editor now renders Unicode directional formatting by default.
• The editor now shows if the domains of an extension publisher are verified by Visual Studio Marketplace.
• TypeScript 4.5 support is previewed.
• Work continues on making the Visual Studio Code workbench ready for enabling Electron process sandboxing. Visual Studio Code leverages GitHub’s Electron framework for writing cross-platform applications. With Visual Studio Code 1.62, efforts were made to move Node.js file services out of the workbench window and into a different process. The same was done for the file watcher, which no longer forks from the workbench window but from a different background process.
• Two subsequent updates have been made to Visual Studio Code 1.62. Version 1.62.1 addresses a security issue pertaining to the use of a command-line flag with ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE, and version 1.62.2 addresses a number of issues pertaining to semantic highlighting, notebooks, and other features.

Visual Studio Code 1.62 also features a preview of Visual Studio Code for the Web, a zero-install experience running in the browser. The predecessor Visual Studio Code 1.6.1 was released last month.