JavaScript debugging improvements also highlighted in latest upgrade to the open source code editor. Credit: Getty Images Visual Studio Code 1.53, the latest version of Microsoft’s popular open source code editor, offers a customizable search mode among a host of improvements. Published February 4 but dubbed the January 2021 release, Visual Studio Code 1.53 can be downloaded from visualstudio.com. Introduced in this release is a search.mode setting that allows users to configure options for UI search commands such as “Search: Find in Files” and the explorer’s “Find in Folder” and “Find in Workspace” context menu entries. The options include: view: Searches using the search view in the sidebar or panel. newEditor: Searches in a new Search Editor. existingEditor: Reuses an existing open Search Editor if one exists, otherwise creates a new one. Previously, the recommended way to configure default search UI was to edit keybindings. This is no longer necessary. These keybindings can be removed in favor of this setting. Other new features and improvements in Visual Studio Code 1.53: Conditional exception breakpoints are enabled in the JavaScript debugger. Node.js worker_threads also are supported. An editor.wrapTabs setting lets editor tabs wrap rather than showing a scrollbar. Two new settings allow developers to configure whether editor tabs show decorations, such as git status or diagnostics. Developers can use editor.decorations.colors to decorate tabs with colors (e.g. red/green for files with errors and warnings) or use workbench.editor.decorations.badges to decorate tabs with badges (e.g. M for git modified. Notebook cells now show up in the outline pane and in breadcrumbs, allowing for an improved overview and quick navigation within notebooks. Emmet, a toolkit for web developers, now works faster with HTML and CSS files. Guidelines have been published for extension authors. The Open Editors view is now hidden by default. Support has been improved for the upcoming TypeScript 4.2 release, with improvements such as JS Doc templates now generating @returns and deprecated DOM APIs marked as such. Visual Studio 1.53 follows Visual Studio Code 1.52, released in December, and a version 1.52.1 point release that fixed issues such as a problem with breakpoint settings in PHP. Development ToolsJavaScript