Where we’ve been, and where we’re going

About two years ago I started a side project with the intention to bring Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code editor to a wider audience — specifically those users on Chromebook devices, and on the Raspberry Pi single-board computer.

The response was a lot stronger than I’d expected, and since that time I’ve been really pleased to hear from a lot of folks who’ve been using these releases at home, in the classroom, and even in the datacenter.

It’s always been my intent to streamline the experience as much as possible, not least as the users of these devices are by-and-large just beginning to learn about technology. Asking these same people, therefore, to jump straight into the process of compiling and installing software themselves was a non-starter, so I started packaging nightly ARM builds of VS Code for Debian and Fedora operating systems. Getting VS Code to run on Chromebooks was a little more involved.

Under the covers, Chrome OS is effectively a Linux derivative, but has a quite restrictive sandbox by design. I was able to leverage the excellent Crouton project to run Linux builds of VS Code in a container. This effectively broadcasts the X11 window into Chrome OS, allowing the editor to run as if it were a native application.

The scripts from https://code.headmelted.com would have automated setting this up for you. I say would have has I have a couple of changes to announce that will change this process quite a bit (for the better, I hope).

Can you believe there’s a picture of Doc and Marty eating a pie? Expect this to be a running theme.

In the time since I started this project, there have been a few significant developments that directly impact these builds— and as a result I have three announcements to make today regarding the Visual Studio Code for ARM releases at https://code.headmelted.com.