Visual Studio Code v1.49 Changelog

This update is all about making your coding life easier and less annoying, especially if you work on large projects or collaborate with others. It matters most to developers who want to keep their code clean without messing up their teammates' work, and to anyone who uses JavaScript or TypeScript.

What's new

• Format only what you changed: When working on a group project, formatting your whole file can create messy updates. Now, you can set VS Code to only format the specific lines you actually edited.
• Change text casing in Search: If you need to change a word to all-caps or all-lowercase across your whole project, the global Search and Replace tool can now do that automatically using special text commands.
• Better debugging filters: When running your code to find errors (debugging), you can now easily filter the output console to find exactly what you're looking for.
• Smarter auto-attach for Node.js: If you run JavaScript using Node.js, VS Code is now "smart" enough to automatically connect its debugger to your scripts or test runners without you having to set it up manually.
• JSDoc @deprecated warnings: If you write a note in your code marking a piece of code as outdated (deprecated), VS Code will now cross it out with a line wherever it's used, so you know it shouldn't be used anymore.
• Notebook updates: If you use data science notebooks, the layout is better. For example, the numbers that show the order you ran your code cells in are now easier to see while the code is running.

Improvements

• Smarter auto-imports: When you install a new package of code for a JavaScript or TypeScript project, VS Code is now better at finding it and offering to import it automatically, even if you haven't used it yet.
• Faster loading for big projects: In the past, if you opened a massive project, you had to wait for the whole thing to load before VS Code could give you code suggestions (IntelliSense). Now, it can give you basic suggestions from the file you're currently looking at while the rest of the project loads in the background.
• TypeScript refactoring: VS Code can now clean up messy code that checks for empty variables by turning them into a neat, shortened format called an "optional chain."
• Multi-cursor formatting: If you highlight multiple separate chunks of code at the same time, you can now format all of them at once.
• Keyboard shortcut troubleshooting: If your keyboard shortcuts are acting weird, there's a new tool that logs exactly what keys VS Code recognizes when you press them, making it much easier to figure out why a shortcut isn't working.
• Find box control: When you search for a word, the cursor usually jumps to the match as you type. Now, you can change a setting so the cursor only jumps when you press Enter, which is helpful if you don't want the screen jumping around while you type.

Fixes

• HTML tag renaming: A feature that automatically renames matching HTML tags when you change one (like changing a <div> to a <span>) had bugs and performance issues. These were fixed so it works much more smoothly.
• General bug fixes: The developers also released three small follow-up updates (1.49.1, 1.49.2, and 1.49.3) shortly after this release to squash various minor bugs and keep things stable.

Breaking changes

No breaking changes in this release.