Top 10 VS Code Features for Remote Work


These days, many people work remotely. A lot of that work happens in Microsoft Visual Studio Code. Here are the top 10 VS Code Features for Remote Work:

1. Remote Development Extension Pack: Allows you to develop in your dev environment from VS Code over SSH or any other protocol

2. Live Share: Collaborate on code with others for real-time pair programming

3. SSH FS: Use SSH to mount remote file systems in your local workspace

4. Remote – WSL: Access the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and run Linux commands on your development machine in a local terminal

5. GitHub Pull Requests and Issues: Manage GitHub pull requests and issues directly from VS Code

6. GitLens – Git supercharged: View your git log with branches and tags, visualize git changes, and easily find code history

7. Markdown All in One: Markdown editing, preview, syntax highlighting, linting, spell checking, live preview, PDF export, table of contents generation, emoji support, and more!

8. Presentation Mode: Present your code or create presentations using markdown using this extension

9. Project Manager – Manage your projects in a simple way: Quickly switch between projects without having to

Visual Studio Code is a great editor for working remotely. The process of setting up SSH connections and remote development is straightforward when following Microsoft’s official documentation.

Once you have your development environment up and running, there are a few more features of VS Code that will help you improve your workflow and productivity.

In this blog post, I’m going to talk about my top 10 features for working remotely with VS Code. These are the features I find myself using the most when working from home or from a client site. The list is also in no particular order!

1. LSP

2. Integrated Terminal

3. Remote Explorer

4. Live Share

5. Extension: Remote – Containers

6. Multi-root Workspaces

7. Extensions: Auto Close Tag & Auto Rename Tag (HTML)

8. Extensions: Remote – SSH & Remote – WSL

9. File Explorer Context Menu (Right-click)

10. Side Bar Context Menu (Right-click)

As the world has shifted to remote work, developers have been looking for new ways to make their lives easier. Many popular tools that were already available for use with remote machines are now being used by a much larger audience.

VS Code is one of those tools. It’s well known for its support for working remotely and many of its extensions can be used remotely as well. In this post, we’ll look at some of my favorite features of VS Code to use when working remotely.

Work from home has become the new normal for many, and it is expected to continue for years. While many VS Code features work equally well for local and remote development, there are some notable differences worth highlighting. This blog post goes through the Top 10 VS Code remote development features and how they can help you be more productive when working with a remote machine or container.

(If you’re not yet familiar with VS Code’s Remote Development extensions, check out our Remote Development extension overview.)

When I first joined MSFT as a new grad, my first review at the company said: “you’re a great remote worker”. That stuck with me and I’ve been working remotely ever since.

It’s not been all smooth sailing though. A lot of my work has been in teams that were initially colocated but later transitioned to being fully remote or partly remote. This transition has always had its friction points, some of them subtle and hard to measure.

The first time I noticed this was when I was on a team where our leader said: “I don’t know how much code you guys are writing because you’re remote, so we’re going to have this ‘remote code day’ once a month”. The implication was that we wrote less code than the onsite folks because we couldn’t see what other people were doing as easily. You can imagine what the resulting motivation level of the offsite folks looked like after that!

It’s an unfortunate reality that “being present” is still valued higher than “producing results”, even in today’s world.

Slowly though, the tooling is catching up and making it easier for us to be more productive while working remotely. VS Code is one such tool that has made this possible for me personally and I

VS Code’s Remote Development extensions allow developers to extend a local VS Code workspace to a remote machine or container. If you’re working with a remote team and need to collaborate on code, or you want to work from an environment other than your local machine, this is the extension pack for you.

Remote work has become increasingly common in the past few years, and is only likely to continue growing in popularity. In fact, according to a 2019 Gartner survey, 82% of employees will be working remotely at least some of the time by the end of 2020. For remote teams, communication tools like Slack and Zoom are critical for staying connected with team members across multiple locations. But equally important is having tools that let you effectively collaborate on code with your teammates.

VS Code’s Remote Development extensio

1. Remote Development with VS Code

VS Code is a lightweight but powerful source code editor which runs on your desktop and is available for Windows, macOS and Linux. It comes with built-in support for JavaScript, TypeScript and Node.js and has a rich ecosystem of extensions for other languages (such as C++, C


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