Choose your browser and use OpenAI’s GPT-4o AI model – Visual Studio Magazine

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VS Code 1 92: Choose your browser, use OpenAI’s GPT-4o AI model

A highlight of the latest version of Microsoft’s open-source code editor Visual Studio Code is the ability to choose your default browser for opening links, as well as access to a new, advanced AI model.

“A new environment workbench.externalBrowser allows you to configure which browser to use to open links,” the development team said when announcing the July 2024 update that brings VS Code to version 1.92. “By default, the operating system’s default browser is used. You can configure this setting at the workspace level and also enable settings synchronization.

“Specify the full path to the browser executable as the setting value. To ensure correct functionality on all devices, you can alternatively use browser aliases such as Edge, Chrome or Firefox.”

Here is the new functionality in animated action:

Another highlight of the release is the upgrade of the GitHub Copilot chat feature to use OpenAI’s GPT-4o model, which significantly improves the quality and speed of code suggestions and explanations. “Our experiments show that GPT-4o significantly improves Copilot’s coding capabilities, providing faster, more accurate, and higher quality code and explanations directly in your editor,” the team said. “This was evident during the rollout as developers increasingly used the Copilot chat view and incorporated more of their code suggestions.”

Additionally, GitHub Copilot now has a feature that can return code that matches publicly available code on GitHub.com. This feature, available to users with an organizational or personal subscription, shows details of detected code matches in code completions. It is gradually rolling out to chat users, and once enabled, they will see a “View matches” link in Copilot chat replies that opens an editor to view the matched code references.

Here is a summary of other highlights in the release with links to specific information:

Read the detailed announcement for information on:

• VS Code-native IntelliSense for PowerShell
• TypeScript 5.6 support
• Suggested APIs
• Improvements to the VS Code website
• Technical improvements and important general bug fixes