Visual Studio Code Documentation

You've found the Visual Studio Code documentation GitHub repository, which contains the content for the Visual Studio Code documentation.

Topics submitted here will be published to the Visual Studio Code portal.

If you are looking for the VS Code product GitHub repository, you can find it here.

Index

1. About Visual Studio Code
2. Feedback
3. Documentation Issues
4. Contributing to the documentation
5. Publishing

Visual Studio Code

VS Code is a lightweight source code editor and powerful development environment for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications. It is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, macOS, and Windows.

If you landed here looking for other information about VS Code, head over to our website for additional information.

Feedback

If you want to give documentation feedback, please use the feedback control located at the bottom of each documentation page.

Documentation Issues

To enter documentation bugs, please create a new GitHub issue. Please check if there is existing issue first.

If you think the issue is with the VS Code product itself, please enter issues in the VS Code product repo here.

Contributing

To contribute with new topics / information or make changes to existing documentation, please read the Contributing Guideline.

Workflow

The two suggested workflows are:

• For small changes, use the "Edit" button on each page to edit the Markdown file directly on GitHub.
• If you plan to make significant changes or preview the Markdown files in VS Code, clone the repo to edit and preview the files directly in VS Code.

Cloning

If you plan to add or modify {gif,mp4,jpg,png} files, please follow the Git LFS Setup.

If you only plan to edit the MD files, you can use the normal Git workflow. Notice that images will be broken in Markdown Preview because images are not retrieved locally:

git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-docs.git
cd vscode-docs
yarn

Git LFS Setup

We have adopted Git LFS to store the images in this repo. Here's the recommended setup:

• Install Git LFS.
• GIT_LFS_SKIP_SMUDGE=1 git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-docs.git. This only downloads text files that amount to ~16MB.
• cd vscode-docs
• git lfs install inside the vscode-docs repo. You only need to run this once.
• git lfs pull -I <PATTERN>, where <PATTERN> is a string of comma-separated globs. For example:
  • git lfs pull -I "docs/nodejs". Only download images in docs/nodejs.
  • git lfs pull -I "release-notes/images/1_3*/*". Only download images in latest release notes.
• Alternatively, use git config lfs.fetchinclude "docs" so future git lfs pull only pulls images in docs.

The history of this repo before we adopt LFS can be found at microsoft/vscode-docs-archive.

Publishing

Steps for how to publish documentation changes can be found here in the (private) repository of the VS Code website.