isual Studio Code 1.80 introduces enhanced stability for Remote Tunnels to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) instances, marking an important milestone in the latest upgrade of Microsoft’s popular code editor. With Remote Tunnels, users can securely establish connections to a remote machine from a VS Code client, eliminating the need for SSH.

The stabilization of the previously previewed feature to connect to WSL over Remote Tunnels allows for direct connections from the Remote Explorer. WSL enables developers to run a GNU/Linux environment directly on Windows, and Remote Tunnels to WSL is compatible with both VS Code desktop and vscode.dev.

In addition to the Remote Tunnels enhancement, VS Code 1.80 brings improvements to editor group and tab resizing. Two new settings have been introduced: “workbench.editor.doubleClickTabToToggleEditorGroupSizes” allows users to disable toggling the size of an editor group from maximized to restored when double-clicking a tab, while “workbench.editor.tabSizingFixedMinWidth” controls the minimum size of a tab when “workbench.editor.tabSizing” is set to fixed. The default value for “workbench.editor.splitSizing” has also changed to “auto,” which evenly distributes available size to all groups if none of the editor groups has been resized. Otherwise, the space of the split group is divided in half and assigned to the new editor group.

Released on July 6, Visual Studio Code 1.80, also known as the June 2023 release, is available for download on Windows, Linux, and macOS via the official project website. Alongside the stabilization of Remote Tunnels and editor improvements, the update includes several other noteworthy features and enhancements:

• “Expand” and “Shrink” commands can now be configured to skip subwords.
• For improved accessibility, the “Open Command” (Alt+F2) allows screen readers to inspect content character by character.
• Support for new link formats has been added, including links that require scanning upwards to find the file and links.
• Images in the terminal, previously available in preview mode, are now enabled by default.
• TypeScript 5.2 support is being previewed.
• A Mypy type checker extension is now available to provide type-checking support for Python using the mypy Python linter.
• A new Python debugger extension called Debugpy has been introduced as a separate entity from the Python extension. This was developed to address a situation where users were unable to upgrade their codebase and couldn’t debug applications with the latest version of the Python extension, as support for Python 2.7 and Python 3.6 was removed.

Visual Studio Code 1.80 brings a range of improvements and new features, catering to the needs of developers across various workflows and enhancing the overall coding experience.