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Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a free, open-source code editor developed by Microsoft. It is designed to be lightweight and fast, yet still provide a rich set of features for both professional and novice software development. Visual Studio Code supports a wide range of programming languages and includes features such as syntax highlighting, code completion, and debugging tools. The editor also supports extensions, allowing users to customize and extend its functionality. Additionally, Visual Studio Code has a large and active community of developers who contribute to its development and create extensions for the editor. It is suitable for a wide range of development tasks, from simple script editing to complex application development. In addition to ChromeOS, It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, making it a versatile and accessible tool for developers on any platform.

Installing Visual Studio Code

You can install Visual Studio Code on a Intel or AMD based ChromeOS device by running the following on the ChromeOS Linux Terminal

sudo apt-get install wget gpg
wget -qO- https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | gpg --dearmor > packages.microsoft.gpg
sudo install -D -o root -g root -m 644 packages.microsoft.gpg /etc/apt/keyrings/packages.microsoft.gpg
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64,arm64,armhf signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/packages.microsoft.gpg] https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/code stable main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vscode.list'
rm -f packages.microsoft.gpg
sudo apt update
sudo apt install code

You can install Visual Studio Code on a Intel or AMD based ChromeOS device by running the following on the ChromeOS Linux Terminal

sudo apt-get install wget gpg
wget -qO- https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | gpg --dearmor > packages.microsoft.gpg
sudo install -D -o root -g root -m 644 packages.microsoft.gpg /etc/apt/keyrings/packages.microsoft.gpg
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64,arm64,armhf signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/packages.microsoft.gpg] https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/code stable main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vscode.list'
rm -f packages.microsoft.gpg
sudo apt update
sudo apt install code

Launching VSCode

There are two ways to launch VSCode on ChromeOS once installed.

ChromeOS Application Launcher

Once the installation of Visual Studio Code is complete, you will be able to launch Visual Studio Code from the ChromeOS Application Launcher.

Within An Existing Project Workspace

If your project already has a project workspace setup, you can launch Visual Studio Code directly from the ChromeOS Terminal by running the following command from within the project directory

code .

The period after the command will direct Visual Studio Code to launch with the current working directory in focus so you can begin to work on your project.