Four years ago I wrote how to BUILD (literally compile) Visual Studio Code for a Raspberry Pi ARM machine. Just a few months later in November, community member Jay Rodgers released his labor of love - nightly builds of VS Code for Chromebooks and Raspberry Pi.

If you want to get unofficial builds of Visual Studio Code running on a Raspberry Pi (I know you have one!) you should use his instructions. He has done a lot of work to make this very simple. Head over to http://code.headmelted.com/ and make it happen for yourself, now!

Jay says:

I've maintained the project for a few years now and it has expanded from providing binaries for Pi to providing support and tools to get VS Code running on low-end ARM devices that might not otherwise support it like Chromebooks (which make up about 60% of the devices in schools now). The project has really taken off among educators (beyond what I would have thought), not least because they're restricted to the devices provided and it gives them a route to teach coding to students on these computers that might not otherwise be there.

Again, Jay is doing this out of love for the community and the work that makes it happen is hosted at https://github.com/headmelted/codebuilds. I'd encourage you to head over there right now and give him a STAR.

There's so many community members out there doing "thankless" work. Thank them. Thank them with a thank you email, a donation, or just your kindness when you file an issue and complain about all the free work they do for you.

I just picked up a Raspberry Pi 4 from Amazon, and I was able to get a community build of VS Code running on it easily!

Open a terminal, run "sudo -s" and then this script (again, the script is open source):

. <( wget -O - https://code.headmelted.com/installers/apt.sh )

Jay has done the work! That's just the apt instructions, but he's got Chrome OS, APT, YUM, and a manual option over at http://code.headmelted.com/!

Thank you for making this so much easier for us all.

Love Raspberry Pis? Here's some fun stuff you can do with the Raspberry that you bought, the one you meant to do fun stuff with, and the one in your junk drawer. DO IT!

Enjoy!

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