Visual Studio Code smooths branch switching

Visual Studio Code 1.89, the April 2024 release of Microsoft’s popular code editor, has arrived with capabilities including enhanced branch switching and middle-click paste support.

The update, downloadable from the project website, was announced May 2. Enhanced branch switching addressed a long-standing feature request to save and restore editors when switching between source control branches. Developers can use the scm.workingSets.enabled setting to enable this capability.

The new VS Code release also lets developers get a quick preview of an image or video in Markdown by hovering over the image or video path. Developers do not have to open the full Markdown preview capability. Also in this release, Microsoft has improved how the code editor handles header renaming in cases where a Markdown file has duplicated headers.

Other features in Visual Studio Code 1.89:

• Middle-click paste support has been expanded. On most Linux distributions, a middle-click pastes the selection. Similar behavior now can be enabled on other operating systems by configuring terminal.integrated.middleClickBehavior to paste.
• Quick Search, for quickly performing a text search across workspace files, has moved beyond the experimental stage.
• Selecting the change icon from the terminal tab context menu now opens the new icon picker that was built for profiles.
• ANSI hyperlink support has been expanded.
• Customizing keybindings for user interface actions has been made more straightforward.
• Local workspace extensions, introduced in VS Code 1.88, now is generally available. Developers can include an extension directly in a workspace and install it only for that workspace.
• The TypeScript 5.5 beta is supported via the JavaScript and TypeScript Nightly extension.
• In the API space, improved support is offered for language features in comment input editors. Also, the window activity API has been finalized.
• Terminal inline chat is now the default experience in the terminal for the GitHub Copilot AI-based programming assistant. Also, GitHub Copilot Content Exclusions now is supported in Copilot Chat for all Copilot for Business and Copilot Enterprise customers.