Visual Studio Code

The usage of Microsoft marketplace for extensions is restricted to products of the Visual Studio Code's family. Consequently, it cannot be used by Code-OSS (see FS#67780).

The code and vscodium-bin^AUR/vscodium^AUR/vscodium-git^AUR packages are configured to use the Open VSX registry, maintained by the Eclipse Foundation. This explains why Code-OSS seems to be unable to find certain extensions.

Known workarounds are:

• manually install the extension from its .vsix file, which can be obtained from the Microsoft Visual Studio Code Marketplace;
• ask the maintainer to upload its extension to the Open VSX registry;
• add the Microsoft Visual Studio Code Marketplace by using the one of the following packages relative to the build you are using: code-marketplace^AUR//. Those packages installs a Pacman hook that patches the file product.json as shown in this Github comment after every package update. Note that using the Microsoft Marketplace in this way would not comply with the its terms of use.

View > Integrated Terminal or opens up an integrated terminal. By default, Bash is used with no additional arguments, although this can be changed.

sets the default shell to be used and
sets the arguments to be passed to the shell.

Example:

~/.config/Code/User/settings.json

"terminal.integrated.shell.linux": "/usr/bin/fish",
"terminal.integrated.shellArgs.linux": ["-l","-d 3"]

You might face weird prompts after setting the integrated shell arguments with an external terminal. Remove the line to solve the problem or use an external terminal.

If you are using Terminator as default terminal for Arch and you have an error on Visual Studio Code: , you can change the terminal that will be used by Visual Studio to another terminal (e.g. ).

sets the default terminal to be used for exec debug.

Example:

~/.config/Code/User/settings.json

"terminal.external.linuxExec": "gnome-terminal"

If you are using a Wayland-based WM or DE, you can force Visual Studio Code to run natively under Wayland (instead of under XWayland) by adding command-line options . For example, you can try launching VSCode using

$ code --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland

These options can be automatically applied every time Visual Studio Code is launched by adding them to the file . Visual Studio Code no longer reads and therefore it should not be used.

Visual Studio Code uses DBus to pass the menu to Plasma, try installing .

By default, Electron applications use to delete files. kioclient5 is automatically selected instead if Plasma is detected. Different trash implementations can be used by setting the environment variable.

For example, for deleting files using :

$ ELECTRON_TRASH=trash-cli code

At the time of writing, Electron supports kioclient5, , , (default) and (deprecated). More info is available at this documentation page.

If you want to debug C#.NET (using the OmniSharp extension) then you need to install the Microsoft branded release (from the AUR). This is apparently because the .NET Core debugger is only licensed to be used with official Microsoft products - see this github discussion.

When using the open-source package, debugging fails fairly quietly. The debug console will just show the initial message:

For debugging with the open-source package can be used. To run it in VS Code, add this configuration to .NET Core launch configuration of the project:

./.vscode/launch.json

"configurations": [
    {
...
    "pipeTransport": {
        "pipeCwd": "${workspaceFolder}",
        "pipeProgram": "/usr/bin/bash",
        "pipeArgs": ["-c"],
        "debuggerPath": "/usr/bin/netcoredbg"
    }
...

You have to switch from mono to proper SDK version props.

Modify import to look like this:

It is noted in the OmniSharp introduction that Arch Linux users should install the package. Without it, you might get an error like:

OmniSharp Log

[info]: OmniSharp.MSBuild.Discovery.MSBuildLocator
        Registered MSBuild instance: StandAlone 15.0 - "~/.vscode/extensions/ms-vscode.csharp-1.18.0/.omnisharp/1.32.11/omnisharp/msbuild/15.0/Bin"
            MSBuildExtensionsPath = /usr/lib/mono/xbuild
            BypassFrameworkInstallChecks = true
            CscToolPath = ~/.vscode/extensions/ms-vscode.csharp-1.18.0/.omnisharp/1.32.11/omnisharp/msbuild/15.0/Bin/Roslyn
            CscToolExe = csc.exe
            MSBuildToolsPath = ~/.vscode/extensions/ms-vscode.csharp-1.18.0/.omnisharp/1.32.11/omnisharp/msbuild/15.0/Bin
            TargetFrameworkRootPath = /usr/lib/mono/xbuild-frameworks
System.TypeLoadException: Could not load type of field 'OmniSharp.MSBuild.ProjectManager:_queue' (13) due to: Could not load file or assembly 'System.Threading.Tasks.Dataflow, Version=4.5.24.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a' or one of its dependencies.
...

You might be able to build anyway (possibly depending whether you have installed too).

Omnisharp ships with its own mono version, so, if it is unable to locate the installed one, if you want to tell omnisharp to look for a "global" mono installed in your machine, put this in your settings.json:

This feature does not work in the code package, because Microsoft does not support the way the Arch package is packaged (native instead of bundled Electron). See and the upstream bug report for more information.

The binary release does not have this issue, and the feature works there.

As per the wiki on GitHub:

Switching keyboard layouts under some Linux window managers does not result in a change in the low level X window APIs VS Code uses to read the current keyboard layout. This means that VS Code ends up sometimes reading one of the other configured keyboard layouts and not the current active one. PR welcome...

Per the wiki, there are two possible solutions:

1. make sure returns as the first keyboard layout the one you want to work with in VS Code.
2. use in your settings and restart VS Code. This will prevent VS Code from trying to determine your keyboard layout whatsoever.

In the official build of VS Code, a product.json file lists the extensions that are allowed to use certain proposed APIs accessed by extensions. However, the product.json is absent in the OSS build code.

In the related issues below, some flags may be required to enable certain APIs. You may either run code with these flags, or you can add the relevant entries to the section in the product.json file (code installs this to /usr/lib/code/product.json).

This can also be resolved by installing the package, which installs a pacman hook that patches the file on every package update. Alternatively, you may also consider installing the Microsoft branded packages: , .

Use either the solution above by editing the product.json, or open VS Code with:

$ code --enable-proposed-api ms-vsliveshare.vsliveshare

Open VS Code enabling remote-containers API as commented in :

$ code-oss --enable-proposed-api ms-vscode-remote.remote-containers

Open VS Code with:

$ code --enable-proposed-api GitHub.vscode-pull-request-github

This error is a result of an encrypted ssh-key, and can be solved by installing a dialogue provider like SSH keys#x11-ssh-askpass or the alternatives listed there like ksshaskpass for KDE.

One thing to note is that for e.g. ksshaskpass you would need to link it from to get VSCode to find it:

# ln /usr/bin/ksshaskpass /usr/lib/ssh/ssh-askpass

Characters that are too wide can end up clipping. For example the italic bold text of Deno stack-traces.

This can be avoided by setting "terminal.integrated.rendererType" to "experimentalWebgl".

Visual Studio Code defaults to run under XWayland, which may cause blurry text if you are using HiDPI screens. To fix this issue, try forcing Electron to run under Wayland—see #Running natively under Wayland.

See settings-sync#_troubleshooting-keychain-issues

When connecting a Github account, change "vscodium" to "vscode" in the URL as seen in this comment. Then copy the identification token into VSCodium. Should it still fail, install a keyring like or create a new keyring as mentioned here in the Visual Studio Code docs and here on Github.

Currently, vscodium opens gtk file dialogs even in kde. See Uniform look for Qt and GTK applications#Consistent file dialog for more information.