Setting up VSCode for future contributions

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Setting up VSCode for future contributions

I currently develop in two different operating systems, Windows 10 and Mac OS. This leads to many problems when transferring work from one OS to another, but hey, I’m well versed in both system :] My choice of code editor on Windows was originally Notepad++, on my mac it was originally Atom. Now it is both Visual Studio Code. From my experience, VSCode is basically an Atom clone, however it loads much, much faster (time is money, who doesn’t love money $_$).

Here are a few of my favorite extensions:

1. Beautify — code styling.
2. Debugger for Chrome — debugging JavaScript code in the Chrome browser.
3. Open in browser — right-click and open your HTML code within your default browser!
4. Setting sync — since I program on two different OS, this nifty plugin syncs my settings.
5. Unity Tools — I’m a casual game developer on the side, exploring ideas in Unity Engine. This plugin allows me to debug within the code editor instead of an IDE.

I followed the Microsoft’s guide on contribution here. The goal was to build VSCode from the source. And as expected, I ran into many challenges along the way.

• The minimum Node version VSCode required was 8.9.1, I had 8.8.1. I had to uninstall Node the hard way as it was originally installed via .dmg file. This was on my Macbook. If you’re reading this, please… use Brew! I spent a lot of time fully removing Node from my Mac. This is a good start if you’re interested → How to uninstall Node.
• The second issue I ran into was that Brew installs the latest version of Node, which was 9.5.1. VSCode does not work with Node above 9.0.0… sigh. So after rummaging on Stackoverflow, I discovered NVM(Node Version Manager)!.
• Finally, after installing NVM and specified my Node version to 8.9.4, I couldn’t run NVM, Node nor Yarn. hmmm. After some digging, I found out that none of these commands were being recognized because I didn’t apply change to my bash_profile. DOH!

After finally getting Node to run, the tests and live debugging all worked smoothly.

I discovered a few popular technologies used to build VSCode:

• Electron: an open source framework for creating cross platform native applications using web technologies such as JavaScript, HTML, CSS.
• TypeScript: typed JavaScript that is compiled into plain’ol JavaScript.
• Yarn: think NPM, but for JavaScript! Yarn is a package manager for JavaScript.

Peace~