Bringing the browser developer tools to Visual Studio Code
I wrote a piece that got some discussion here on VS Code (<a href="https://blog.robenkleene.com/2020/09/21/the-era-of-visual-studio-code/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.robenkleene.com/2020/09/21/the-era-of-visual-st...</a>). After writing that piece and reflecting, I decided that VS Code did in fact have one weakness: It doesn't have an embedded browser. I even tried to start a conversation about it on the VS Code Dev Slack here's what I said:<p>> Any thoughts in integrating a browser into VS Code? Panic's just released text editor for macOS, Nova, has this feature. The obvious thing it gets you is a live updating preview of HTML files, but taking it further: With VS Code's development community, this seems like it could be the path forward for features like being able to instantly jump to editing the source file for a CSS rule or an HTML element from the DevTools, or jumping to a component's source file from the React DevTools. I'm aware there a couple of projects that have tried to do integrate a browser into VS Code, but nothing has really come to fruition yet, any thoughts?<p>(Didn’t get much of a response, but obviously no one would talk about this if they knew.)<p>The above summarizes my thoughts, but here’s another one: This is a key component of GitHub Codespaces. One of the weaknesses in remote development is the round trip between the developer server process and the browser is less seamless than when doing local development. The IDE-style debugger integration doesn’t work without running Chrome on the same machine for example.<p>Anyway, VS Code now doesn’t have any weaknesses that I’m aware of anymore.