Visual Studio Code VS codeswing

I'm using Silverblue 39 for about 2 month coming from NixOS Unstable. It's working very well for me. I have some packages layered like Nvidia and fish shell and https://github.com/CheariX/silverblue-akmods-keys for AKMODS modules work with secure boot. Things like neovim, pyright, helix, starship, LSPs and CLI applications I install with brew (brew.sh). For desktop things I use Flatpak.

I had a problem with some Flatpak applications (like Steam and Discord) and brew because brew puts its folder in the $PATH before the default ones (/usr/bin ...) and those Flatpak applications tried to use SSL keys from brew instead of the system ones. I just changed the order of the $PATH to make brew bin path to be after ther system ones.

For VSCode I'm not using the Flatpak I'm using the tarball one I just extract in ~/applications and symlink the code binary in the ~/.local/bin. It's working well, I don't have problem with VSCode not executing LSPs and lint things. The only problem is VSCode from tarball cannot updates itself, so I need to download the newer version and extract to ~/applications. There is this VSCode CLI version (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/?dv=linux64cli) but I was not able to make it use the wayland backend.

Explore the official VS Code documentation on the Visual Studio Code website for in-depth guides, tutorials, and reference materials.

It's a lot, but the VS Code docs have thought about Extraneous Cognitive Load and created written guides, video guides, reference docs and more!

VSCode has a long history of not working well with Unity, so they deprecated it.

> Visual Studio Code is a lightweight but powerful source code editor which runs on your desktop and is available for Windows, macOS and Linux.

I think I found my solution - looks like the codeswing extension (https://aka.ms/codeswing) supports live preview, even in vscode.dev. Awesome!

Many of these features are also available in the other platforms and I really like that you can immediately see the results of your projects as you code them. But this feels like a great end-to-end solution requiring only one login I need for most of my work anyways. Incidently, if you want the immediate display of your project inside VS Code in the browser, you can also install the Codeswing extension.

Codeswing is an awesome tool made to prototype easily from vscode using any frontend you want (you can already have Svelte, React, Vue or Html/CSS/Js), with an auto-refresh rendering preview.

Coding playgrounds (e.g. CodePen, JSFiddle) are a popular way to learn programming languages/libraries, and then share them with others. With github.dev, you can install the CodeSwing extension and begin creating web playgrounds, using your existing editor setup, and with your files persisted back to GitHub.

VS Code with Codewsing: https://github.com/codespaces-contrib/codeswing

Hey! By default, none of the current templates add any libraries to the swing. However, I'm planning on adding new template galleries to make it easy to create/explore ideas using popular frameworks. I'd love to hear if you have any suggestions for what you'd like to see me prioritize (e.g. React, Tailwind, etc.), since I'll be working on that this weekend :D

That said, when you create/open a swing, there will be a "CodeSwing" view on the Explorer tab, which displays all the files in the swing. One of those files will be called "codeswing.json", which is the manifest for the swing itself. If you click on it, you'll see two array properties, called "scripts" and "styles", which list the libraries that have been added to the swing. When you add a new library via the "Add Library" command, it will add the selected library to that file: https://github.com/codespaces-contrib/codeswing#external-lib.... Let me know if you have any feedback on that experience!

Regarding sharing: I also maintain another VS Code extension called GistPad (https://aka.ms/gistpad) that allows you to login to GitHub and then manage gists/repos without cloning/committing files. I'm finalizing the integration between CodeSwing and GistPad that will allow you to create swings as gists, and then share the URL with others. Since GistPad shows your starred gists, and lets you follow other GitHub users, you can also share swings by simply starring/following others that are creating swings in gists.

Additionally, since you can create new swings as local directories (using the "CodeSwing: New Swing..." command), you could store a swing in a GitHub/BB/GitLab repo, and then when others clone and open that repo in VS Code, the CodeSwing extension will detect the swing and automatically launch the right coding environment. The gif in the project's README shows that in action, using GitHub Codespaces.

Let me know if any of that sounds interesting, or if you have feedback on how I could improve the overall experience. Thanks so much for checking out CodeSwing!