What is the Visual Studio Code editor built on

Question

What underlying technologies/libraries is Microsoft's new (free) cross platform editor Visual Studio Code (Launched 5/29/2015) built on? There are rumors that it's just Github's Atom Editor rebranded.

Solution

Visual Studio Code is built using web technologies on top of Github's Electron.

Electron is an app runtime for writing native apps that uses Chromium (which Google Chrome is built on) for rendering the interface and node.js for local APIs (example: file system access), it was built primarily as the shell for Github's Atom code editor. (Note: Electron is very similar to NW.js).

Node.js is a (JavaScript) app runtime built on Google's V8 JavaScript engine with C and C++ code to give it access to native APIs for each operating system (example: file system access).

Essentially, Microsoft's new product is built completely upon open source software whose major components were created by Google.

There are rumors that Visual Studio code is either a fork or rebranding of Github's Atom Editor. This is not even remotely true. Inspecting the source of Visual Studio Code reveals that it uses Electron and Atom Shell Archive, but nothing else is from the Atom editor.

The 'editor' (the thing that renders the code with syntax highlighting, line numbers, etc..) part of Visual Studio Code is Microsoft's Monaco editor. It is the same editor used for OneDrive, Windows Azure, TypeScript Playground, and Visual Studio Online. I have yet to find any real documentation on this editor from Microsoft but there are some articles about it around the web.

Omnisharp is used to provide IntelliSense and other code editing tools for C# (example: refactoring).

The JavaScript Intellisense appears to be all custom code. It provides impressive JavaScript completions but it many cases it appears to be inferior to Tern (see Tern Demo).

Comments

[avo]

Also: What is the framework behind VSCode UI?

[elcuco]

I have been looking into Code for a day and it changed my view regarding JS in a desktop App. I looked at Atom and was very dissapointed, as it could not do basic things I expect it to do from a text editor. Code proved me wrong, what text editor control can I use in my node-desktop/web-app ?

[Sevin7]

@elcuco - The Ace Editor (ace.c9.io/build/kitchen-sink.html) and Code Mirror (codemirror.net) are HTML code editors (I personally prefer Ace).

[Faktor 10]

What is nice to see is the software greats making a come back, I believe Erik Gamma (GoF) has been involved in the tooling for Visual Studio code and as yet unreleased online "monaco" and Anders Hejslberg (creator of Pascal/ Delphi) is largely responsible for Typescript (Superset of Javascript making it type safe)

[Juha Palomäki]

Visual Studio Code is now open source, under MIT license: github.com/Microsoft/vscode

[kmote]

The Monaco editor is now open source as well, and has a good deal of documentation on their hub, including extensive API documentation

[Menai Ala Eddine - Aladdin]

Did they use only HTML and CSS for the UI or an UI framework?