The new Microsoft is a company that makes tools available across a multitude of platforms. That's great for customers as it allows for platform choice without needing to sacrifice the tools that users are accustomed to using.

Visual Studio Code is one of the new bread of tools that works seemingly everywhere. It's also become a favorite editor for Ops personnel who write scripts or manipulate JSON & YAML files. The combination of autocomplete for commands along with a rich collection of plug-ins has helped the tool gain in popularity.

This blog post discusses installation of Visual Studio Code on Mac OS.

Overview

Install Git
Install VS Code
Install VS Code Extensions

Part 1 - Install Git

Installing Git isn't a requirement, however, it makes things easier to have Git installed before VS Code, as VS Code checks for Git upon launch.

Git for Mac can be installed from https://git-scm.com. After downloading the package, install it.

Part 2 - Install Visual Studio Code

Download the code from https://code.visualstudio.com/ then extract and double-click the expanded file.

Part 3 - Install Extensions

Visual Studio Code offers almost any extension imaginable. There are many lists of "top extensions for VS Code" on the internet. I recommend starting with this list from Microsoft - #FiveThings : Five VS Code Extensions You Should Know About {S:01 E:17} After that, move on and explore extensions related to the type of work you expect to do. In addition to traditional programming tools, there are extensions for connecting to cloud providers such as Azure and AWS. There's also a very nice extension for Docker.