Microsoft flagged up the last update of Visual Studio Code last week, with a raft of update features and a couple of handfuls of “notable fixes”.

The vendor detailed the changes in a blog post last week, cunningly entitled January 2020 (version 1.42).

Top of the VS Code team’s list of improvements is the ability to preview Rename changes, which “displays pending changes in a diff editor and allows you to uncheck/check individual changes”.

New settings allow users to limit the number of editors open at the same time. There are also improvements to untitled editors, including no longer using generic names, but using the first line of the content of the document instead. 

Users also get a list of most recently used editors, across all editor groups, the tools panel can be moved to the left side of the editor, and all windows can now be restored on startup. Changes in the editor include highlighting for folded code regions, and refinements to the fold command.

There are also a raft of preview features, which the team is looking for feedback on. These include a new timeline view, described as “a unified view for visualizing time-series events (for example, Git commits, file saves, test runs, etc.) for a resource (file, folder).” There are also a new search editor, a new Java debugger and changes to semantic highlighting for TypeScript and JavaScript for developers’ delectation.

The notable fixes include periodically saving the UI state, to prevent it being lost on shutdown, while a bug which meant the explorer tree did not show correct content when connected to case sensitive file system on a case insensitive platform has been fixed. And for you clean freaks out there, a fix means that text files no longer report dirty for readonly models.

The new version marks the migration from TSLint for linting, to ESLint, after the maintainers of the former decided to deprecate the project. The VS Code team have created a migration guide to help users with the change.