Visual Studio Code 1.87, the February 2024 release of Microsoft’s popular code editor, brings voice dictation, multi-cursor inline suggestions, and support for smarter Python imports and GitHub Copilot-powered symbol renaming.
Published February 28, Visual Studio Code 1.87 can be downloaded at the Visual Studio website for Windows, Linux, and Mac platforms.
With the new release, developers now can use their voices to dictate directly into the editor, provided they have installed the VS Code Speech extension, which enables speech-to-text capabilities. Developers can select from one of the 26 supported languages in VS Code Speech by using the accessibility.voice.speechLanguage setting.
Microsoft also is gradually rolling out rename suggestions powered by the GitHub Copilot AI-powered programming assistant. When developers rename a symbol in the editor, GitHub Copilot suggests a list of possible new names for that symbol, based on the user’s code. The previous version of VS Code added support for GitHub Copilot Chat.
VS Code 1.87 also brings support for multi-cursor inline completions, which are previewed and applied at both the primary and secondary cursor positions. An update to the Pylance extension now includes an Add Imports code action for adding missing imports. Pylance uses heuristics to show only the top three high-confidence import options, prioritized based on criteria such as the most recently used imports and symbols from the same module.
And the new release introduces two new code actions: ‘Search for additional import matches,’ which displays a menu to search for import options that prefix-match the missing import symbol, and ‘Change spelling,’ which offers import suggestions for missing imports due to typos.
Finally, a Refactor preview capability allows developers to review changes that will be applied by a code refactoring. And Sticky Scroll in the editor now is enabled by default.
Visual Studio Code 1.87 follows VS Code 1.86, which arrived February 1 and featured a “Hey Code” voice command that starts sessions in GitHub Copilot Chat.