Visual Studio Code v1.40 Changelog

This update is all about polishing the experience. The developers spent this cycle doing major "housekeeping"—meaning they fixed and organized thousands of community bug reports and feature requests. Alongside that massive cleanup, they added a bunch of quality-of-life improvements for coders, making the interface cleaner and text editing less annoying.

What's new

• Customizable window borders: You can now add colored borders around the VS Code window. You can set one color for when you're actively using the app and a different color for when it's running in the background.
• Keyboard scrolling in lists: You can now press Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down to scroll through lists and file trees using just your keyboard.
• Zen mode silence: "Zen mode" hides all your menus so you can focus. Now, it also hides annoying pop-up notifications (unless it's a critical error) so you aren't distracted while coding.
• Filtering your outline: The "Outline" view (which shows a summary of your code) can now be filtered. You can hide specific things, like variables or functions, so you only see what matters to you at that moment.
• Cursor Redo: There's a new "Cursor Redo" action. If you accidentally undo a cursor movement (like jumping to a specific word), you can now redo that exact movement.
• Disabling hardware acceleration: If VS Code's graphics are glitching on your computer, you can now easily turn off "hardware acceleration" (a setting that uses your graphics card to draw the app) in your config files to force it to run smoother.

Improvements

• Activity Bar indicator: The icons on the far left bar are much clearer now. The one you're currently using stands out better with a new highlight or border color.
• Smarter editor splitting: When you split your screen to view two files side-by-side, a new setting lets you choose whether the new split takes up half the screen evenly, or just shrinks the current file to make room.
• Per-language line endings: You can now tell VS Code to use specific line endings (like Mac/Linux vs. Windows styles) depending on the coding language you're writing in.
• Better special text handling: "Combining characters" (special symbols or accented letters that are pieced together) are now treated as a single block. Your cursor won't get stuck halfway inside them anymore.
• Smarter file comparisons: When comparing two versions of a file, the tool now shows a progress bar if it's taking a long time. It also got smarter at pointing out when the only differences are extra spaces, so you don't get confused looking for missing code.
• Terminal word selection: Double-clicking to highlight a word in the terminal now recognizes commas, colons, and semicolons as breaking points, making it easier to copy exactly what you want.

Fixes

• Terminal shortcuts: Fixed an issue where "chord" shortcuts (pressing two keys together, then another key right after) weren't working properly inside the terminal. They now bypass the terminal and work like normal VS Code shortcuts.
• Terminal symlinks: Fixed a bug where "symbolic links" (shortcuts to other folders) would get confused when opened as a working directory in the terminal.

Breaking changes

No breaking changes in this release.