Visual Studio Code Documentation

You've found the Visual Studio Code documentation GitHub repository, which contains the content for the Visual Studio Code documentation.

Topics submitted here will be published to the Visual Studio Code portal.

If you are looking for the VS Code product GitHub repository, you can find it here.

[!IMPORTANT] The vscode-docs repository uses Git LFS (Large File Storage) for storing binary files such as images and .gifs. If you are contributing or updating images, please enable Git LFS per the instructions in the Contributing section below.

Index

• Index
• Visual Studio Code
• Feedback
• Documentation Issues
• Contributing
  • Workflow
  • Cloning
    • Cloning without binary files
• Publishing

Visual Studio Code

VS Code is a lightweight AI code editor for multi-agent development and a powerful development environment for building modern web, mobile, and cloud applications. It is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, macOS, and Windows.

If you landed here looking for other information about VS Code, head over to our website for additional information.

Feedback

If you want to give documentation feedback, please use the feedback control located at the bottom of each documentation page.

Documentation Issues

To enter documentation bugs, please create a new GitHub issue. Please check if there is an existing issue first.

If you think the issue is with the VS Code product itself, please enter issues in the VS Code product repo.

Contributing

To contribute new topics/information or make changes to existing documentation, please read the Contributing Guideline.

Workflow

The two suggested workflows are:

• For small changes, use the Edit button on each page to edit the Markdown file directly on GitHub.

• If you plan to make significant changes or preview the Markdown files in VS Code, clone the repo to edit and preview the files directly in VS Code.

Cloning

1. Install Git LFS.
2. Run git lfs install to set up global Git hooks. You only need to run this once per machine.
3. SSH auth: git clone git@github.com:microsoft/vscode-docs.git
   HTTPS auth: git clone https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-docs.git
4. Now you can git add binary files and commit them. They'll be tracked in LFS.

Cloning without binary files

You might want to clone the repo without the 1.6GB images. Here are the steps:

1. Install Git LFS.
2. Run git lfs install to set up global Git hooks. You only need to run this once per machine.
3. Clone the repo without binary files.
   • macOS / Linux:
     • SSH auth: GIT_LFS_SKIP_SMUDGE=1 git clone git@github.com:microsoft/vscode-docs.git
     • HTTPS auth: GIT_LFS_SKIP_SMUDGE=1 git clone https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-docs.git
   • Windows:
     • SSH auth: $env:GIT_LFS_SKIP_SMUDGE="1"; git clone git@github.com:microsoft/vscode-docs.git
     • HTTPS auth: $env:GIT_LFS_SKIP_SMUDGE="1"; git clone https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-docs.git
4. Now you can selectively check out some binary files to work with. For example:
   • git lfs pull -I "docs/nodejs" to only download images in docs/nodejs
   • git lfs pull -I "release-notes/images/1_4*/*" to only download images in release-notes/images/1_4*
   • git lfs pull -I "docs,api" to download all images in docs and in api
   • git lfs pull -I <PATTERN>, as long as <PATTERN> is a valid Git LFS Include and Exclude pattern.

The history of this repo before we adopted LFS can be found at microsoft/vscode-docs-archive.

Preview the website

You can host a lightweight documentation website locally on your machine to preview your changes before pushing them to GitHub.

Run the following commands in the terminal from the root of the cloned vscode-docs repo:

npm install
npm run serve

You can then navigate to http://localhost:3000 in your browser to see the documentation website. Any changes you make to the Markdown files will automatically refresh the page so you can see your updates in real time.

Publishing

Publishing merged pull requests is not automatic and is initiated manually after changes have been reviewed on an internal staging server. There is no specific time guarantee for when PR updates will be available on https://code.visualstudio.com but the intent is that they will usually be live within 24 hours.