Paul Krill
Editor at Large

Visual Studio Code stabilizes Remote Tunnels to WSL

news
Jul 13, 20232 mins

Connecting to Windows Subsystem for Linux over Remote Tunnels is out of preview. Group and tab resizing also highlighted in latest VS Code upgrade.

futuristic digital tunnel
Credit: Cetin Aydin

Visual Studio Code 1.80, the latest edition of the popular code editor from Microsoft,  stabilizes Remote Tunnels to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) instances. Remote Tunnels lets you connect securely to a remote machine from a VS Code client without requiring SSH.

Stabilization of the previously previewed capability to connect to WSL over Remote Tunnels enables connections directly from the Remote Explorer. WSL lets developers run a GNU/Linux environment directly on Windows. Remote Tunnels to WSL works on VS Code desktop and vscode.dev.

Elsewhere in VS Code 1.80, the update also improved editor group and tab resizing, A new setting, workbench.editor.doubleClickTabToToggleEditorGroupSizes, disables toggling the size of an editor group from maximized to restored when double-clicking a tab of that group. Another new setting, workbench.editor.tabSizingFixedMinWidth, controls the minimum size of a tab when workbench.editor.tabSizing is set to fixed. A new value for the workbench.editor.splitSizing setting called auto is the new default. In this mode, splitting an editor group distributes available size evenly to all groups only if none of the editor groups has been resized. Otherwise, the space of the split group is divided in half and put in the new editor group.

Announced July 6, Visual Studio Code 1.80, aka the June 2023 release, can be downloaded for Windows, Linux, and macOS from the project website. Other new features and improvements in VS Code 1.80:

  • Commands for Expand and Shrink now can be configured to skip subwords.
  • For accessibility, an Open Command (Alt+F2) lets screen readers inspect content character by character.
  • Support has been added for new link formats, including links that need to scan upwards in order to find the file and links.
  • Images in the terminal, previously in preview, now are enabled by default.
  • TypeScript 5.2 support is previewed.
  • A Mypy type checker extension is available to provide type-checking support for Python using the mypy Python linter. 
  • A new Python debugger extension has been created, called Debugpy, which is separate from the Python extension. This extension resulted from a situation in which users were unable to upgrade a codebase and could not debug applications with the latest version of the Python extension when support was removed for Python 2.7 and Python 3.6 in the Python extension.
Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

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