Visual Studio Code v1.70 Changelog

This update is all about making your coding workspace feel more customized and less cluttered. It matters to anyone who spends a lot of time in VS Code, especially developers who work on large projects, use the terminal heavily, or collaborate with others and need to merge conflicting code.

What's new

• Custom folding: You can now highlight any lines of code and manually collapse them out of the way. This is super helpful for hiding sections of code you aren't currently working on, even if the programming language doesn't support it automatically.
• Tree view search: You can now search directly in side panels like the File Explorer. Just press a shortcut, type what you're looking for, and it will highlight matches or filter out everything else.
• Merge tool by default: When you and a teammate edit the same file and the code conflicts, VS Code's "3-way merge editor" is now turned on by default to help you visually pick which changes to keep.
• Command line merging: If you use the command line, you can now type a command to instantly open those conflicting files in the VS Code merge editor.
• Jump to notebook errors: If you're running code in a Notebook, you can now jump straight to the exact cell that failed, saving you from scrolling to find the error.
• Python setup helper: There's a new "Get Started" experience to help you quickly install and configure Python right inside VS Code.
• Sticky scroll (preview): A new feature that keeps the name of the function or class you're inside of pinned to the top of the screen as you scroll down through long files.

Improvements

• Title bar customization: You can now right-click the very top bar of the app to easily hide or show the menu bar, search box, and layout buttons.
• Multi-select search: When you search your project, you can now select multiple results at once and do something to all of them at the same time (like deleting or replacing them).
• Smarter terminal: "Shell integration" (which lets the terminal understand where your commands start and end) is now turned on by default, making the terminal much more powerful.
• Easier terminal setup: If you do need to manually set up terminal features, it's now a single command that works across Mac, Windows, and Linux.
• Better merge controls: The merge editor now has better colors to highlight conflicts, new menus to accept all changes from one side, and an easier way to manage multiple debugging sessions (when you're running code step-by-step to find a bug).
• Preserved folds: If you collapse a section of code and then accidentally break the code's syntax (like leaving out a quote mark), VS Code will now remember your collapsed sections instead of suddenly expanding everything.

Fixes

• Minor bugs were squashed across the three small patch updates (1.70.1, 1.70.2, and 1.70.3) that followed this release.
• The menu bar folding behavior was fixed: after shrinking the menu to a "hamburger" icon (three lines) to save space, the team listened to feedback and reverted it back to the old, familiar behavior until the menu is fully collapsed.

Breaking changes

• Windows 7 is no longer supported. The final patch for this release (1.70.3) is the very last version of VS Code that will run on Windows 7.