Visual Studio Code 1.65 shines on JavaScript heap profiles, CSS formatting

Visual Studio Code 1.66, also identified as the March 2022 release of the code editor, has just been published by Microsoft. The new release brings improvements to JavaScript heap profiles, CSS code formatting, and local history.

Visual Studio Code 1.66 became available on March 30. It can be downloaded from the project website for Windows, Linux, and MacOS. 

In VS Code 1.66, the JavaScript debugger now supports collecting and visualizing heap profiles, so developers can see where and how much memory is being allocated over time. These profiles have been added as an option in the “Debug: Take Performance Profile” command. Additionally for JavaScript, Microsoft has aligned the semantic highlighting of JavaScript source in HTML files with what is seen in normal .jscode files. This makes code colors more consistent and adds important semantic information that was missing previously, such as highlighting read-only types.

Also in Visual Studio Code 1.66, the built-in CSS extension now ships with a code formatter, implemented by the js-beautify library, that works with CSS, LESS, and CSS. For local history, VS Code 1.66 introduces a history of files available in the Timeline view. Depending on configured settings, every time an editor is saved, a new entry is added to the list.

Elsewhere in Visual Studio Code 1.66:

• A language editor in the settings editor enables viewing and editing of all settings that can be configured for the language with the ID languageId. Users can provide language-specific settings, or language overrides. Also in the settings editor, workspace and folder settings now are preserved until manually reset by the user.
• When searching in the VS Code terminal, all instances of the search term now will be highlighted.
• TypeScript 4.6.3, a minor update that fixes some bugs, is bundled with the editor. TypeScript 4.6 was published in late February.
• An R in Visual Studio Code topic describes R language support in the editor via the R extension.
• Visual Studio Code for the Web now supports dragging and dropping of local files and folders into a browser window opened on vscode.dev or insiders.vscode.dev using a browser that supports the web file system access API to access contents.

Last month’s Visual Studio Code 1.65 release emphasized editor history navigation, debugging, and audio cues.