VS Code on Arch-Linux
Acry, 11 July 2020
Installing VS Code on Arch-Linux
Technical Side
What is VS Code?
It is a multi-platform software developer tool (IDE) by Microsoft. Written in JavaScript and TypeScript, built on the Electron framework.
https://code.visualstudio.com/
VS Code’s source code is MIT-licensed, but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking.
What is VSCodium?
The binaries are licensed under the MIT license. Telemetry is disabled.
The VS Codium project exists so that you don’t have to download+build from source. This project includes special build scripts that clone Microsoft’s VS Code repo, run the build commands, and upload the resulting binaries for you to GitHub releases.
More ways to go
The following packages provide VS Code:
Community Repository:
- code (open-source release)
Arch User Repository:
- visual-studio-code-bin (Microsoft-branded release)
- visual-studio-code-insiders (Microsoft-branded release, daily/nightly snapshots)
- code-git (development git repository)
- vscodium-bin
The Microsoft ptvsd (Python Tools for Visual Studio Debug) server/module is available at python-ptvsd AUR.
Installation
I am going with the version in the community repository:
https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/code/
Version as of time of writing: code-1.47.0-1.
sudo pacman -S code
If you can’t find the version, make sure you updated the package-db with sudo pacman -Syy.
References
Arch-linux has in general pretty good docs:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Visual_Studio_Code
Background-Story
In short: I have been looking for a reasonable C-IDE for decades. I was experimenting with VS Code and C quite a few hours, since I am using VS Code for work with TypeScript. I am going to start using it for my new demos and tutorials.
Cheers,
Acry