14 DAY TRIAL // After informing Ubuntu Linux users about the fact that it's possible to install GitHub's Atom hackable text editor as a Snap, Canonical's David Callé is now announcing the availability of Microsoft's Visual Studio Code source code editor as a Snap.
At the request of many users, the Visual Studio Code source code editor can now finally be installed on any of the supported Ubuntu Linux distributions as a Snap package directly from Canonical's Snappy Store, with a simple command that you need to execute in the Terminal app.
"Launched in 2015 by Microsoft, Visual Studio Code has imposed itself as one of the preferred code editors in the developer community. Cross-platform (powered by Electron), it features a marketplace of more than 3000 extensions where any language can find its linters, debuggers and test runners," said David Callé in the announcement.
Here's how to install Visual Studio Code as a Snap in Ubuntu
Visual Studio Code is known as a very powerful tool for developers, offering them embedded Git control, intelligent code completion, syntax highlighting, snippets, code refactoring, and support for debugging. The IDE is already available for Linux platforms, but on Ubuntu you can now install it just by running the following command.
sudo snap install --classic vscode
That's it! Easy enough, right? Actually, it couldn't be more easily thanks to Canonical's latest Snappy technologies, and it looks like you'll be able to use the above command to install Visual Studio Code on the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), and Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) releases.
Once Visual Studio Code was downloaded and installed, you can run it straight from the command line or via the application menu of the desktop environment you're currently using, be it either Unity, GNOME, KDE, Xfce, or LXDE. The best part of this install method is that when new versions of Visual Studio Code are made available upstream, you'll always have the latest release installed.
