VS Code + XUbuntu An in-depth guide to set up and work to work with VS Code


Lately I’ve been using VS Code with Xubuntu on my main laptop. With this tutorial I’m going to show you how to set up and work with VS Code on Linux.

Installing VS Code

To install VSC, you can either download the .deb from their website or install it using apt:

sudo apt install code

I recently started to work on a project that needs a Windows environment. I set up a VM with Ubuntu and found it very hard to configure VS Code, which is my favorite editor.

So after spending two days, I finally got it right and I decided to share the steps I took here so others might not have to go through that pain.

This is not a short guide or step-by-step tutorial, it is more like a blog post about setting up VS code on linux.

You will learn how to set up your linux VM for using VS code and other tips that can save you time.

Feel free to skip some sections (like the first one) if you don’t have any problems with those things.

I am a huge fan of VS Code. It has a strong community backing it and I have been using it for a while now. Almost all my projects are on Linux and so I need a good editor that can help me get the job done.

It goes without saying that every editor will have its pros and cons and each developer will have his/her own requirements. But this is about me, my requirements, what I like about it and what I don’t.

I’ll be sharing my setup for XUbuntu 16.04 LTS here but most of the steps will work on other distributions as well.

There are a lot of good code editors out there, but Visual Studio Code (VSC for short) is my favourite. It is also very popular, coming in the top ten editors used in a recent survey of Stack Overflow users.

This blog is about setting up VSC on Linux, which has some specific challenges to overcome. I have been working with it on Xubuntu, which I find to be a very good combination.

The full installation procedure takes a while to complete, but once it is done you have an environment where you can code and debug with ease!

The guide to get VSCode up and running on Linux.

Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code (VSCode) is a robust, open-source(!), multi-platform editor that has quickly become my code editor of choice. It’s an Electron app, which I know sets off all sorts of ‘this is not a real dev environment!’ alarm bells, but it’s actually really good.

It has a rich extension library and supports the vast majority of languages I throw at it. It’s fast, stable and just works. So much so that I have used it as my primary IDE for months now and only dip back into my paid-for IDEs when I need some feature (mostly around refactoring) that VS Code doesn’t support yet.

In this post I want to share with you how to get started with VS Code on Linux. How to install it, set up a project, work with git and GitHub, debug your code and more.

Visual Studio Code is a free text editor , but if you use it on Linux you may have some issues with the default key bindings.

This article will guide you to do that.

You are going to need xmodmap. To install xmodmap, run the following command in your terminal:

sudo apt install x11-xkb-utils

Visual Studio Code is by far the most popular code editor. This guide will walk you through the following steps; 1) Installation of dependencies 2) Installing Visual Studio Code 3) Creating a symbolic link to VS Code 4) Adding VS Code to your applications menu and 5) Opening files and folders with VS Code.

Installation of dependencies:

sudo apt install libgtk2.0-0 libgconf-2-4 libxss1 libasound2 libnss3 libxtst6

Installing Visual Studio Code:

Download the latest version of VS Code for Linux here.

Creating a symbolic link to VS Code:

By creating a symbolic link we can open files and folders with VS Code directly from the terminal by running “code .” or “code “. To create a symbolic link run:

sudo ln -s /path/to/vscode/Code /usr/local/bin/code. In my case this was: sudo ln -s /home/mattias/vscode-linux-x64/Code /usr/local/bin/code. After this step you should be able to run “code” from the terminal which will open up Visual Studio code. You should


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