Microsoft tweaks the editor. Reg news desk is fine – it's just the Visual Studio Code August update

Avoid bloated pulls thanks to more formatting smarts

Microsoft's cross-platform code wrangler, Visual Studio Code, has received its monthly batch of updates, including editor tweaks and debugger improvements.

Notable additions this time around include a new command, Format Modified Lines, designed to deal with the occasionally unwanted behaviour of Format on Save and Format Document which can fiddle with code the user hasn't changed, resulting in unexpectedly large pull requests.

Format Selection is also now multicursor-aware when doing its magic.

Other editor tweaks include an option to stop the cursor leaping to a match on search until the user tells it to, as well as a setting for trailing whitespace.

Those who, like us, spend perhaps a little too long squinting at the debug console will be relieved to learn that the cursed thing now features filtering; handy for stripping out irrelevant logging. Exclusion patterns can also be applied, although the filter only applies to program output.

The JavaScript debugger has also seen improvement. Auto Attach can now debug processes even without the passing of an --inspect flag, although if the idea of debugging all node.js scripts isn't for you, the old behaviour can be restored.

TypeScript 4.0.2 has put in an appearance this time around. There is also support for the @deprecated JSDoc tag in JavaScript and TypeScript to mark an API as deprecated. VS Code will then slap a strikethrough on IntelliSense suggestions for deprecated properties.

With TypeScript 4.0, IntelliSense is more useful while a large project loads up. Partial Intellisense is now available on the current file while the rest of the project loads as opposed to being pretty much useless until everything has been parsed.

Other items of note include the detection of the macOS high contrast theme and a completion of the exploration to bundle Electron 9 in Visual Studio Code. ®