February release of Microsoft’s code editor previews new capabilities in the AI coding assistant including Copilot Edits support for notebooks.
Visual Studio Code 1.98 has arrived, featuring enhancements to the GitHub Copilot AI coding assistant, including previews of Copilot Next Edit Suggestions, Copilot agent mode improvements, and Copilot Edits support for notebook files.
Otherwise known as the February 2025 release of Microsoft’s extensible programming editor, Visual Studio Code 1.98 was introduced March 5. It can be downloaded from code.visualstudio.com for Linux, Windows, and Mac. The GitHub Copilot extension for VS Code is accessible from the Visual Studio Marketplace.
Notebook support in Copilot Edits allows developers to use Copilot to edit notebook files with the same experience as editing code files. This is a preview feature available only in VS Code Insiders with the pre-release version of GitHub Copilot Chat. The integration of Copilot Edits with code and notebook editors has been polished in VS Code 1.98, Microsoft said. There is no more scrolling while changes are being applied and the viewport stays in place, making it easier to focus on changes. In addition, edit review actions have been renamed from “Accept” to “Keep” and from “Discard” to “Undo” to better reflect what is happening.
In another change, a collapsed mode has been added for Next Edit Suggestions (NES), a capability in which Copilot predicts the next edit. There also is more advanced code base search in Copilot. When developers add #codebase to a Copilot Chat query, Copilot helps find relevant code in a workspace for a chat prompt. Now, #codebase can run tools such as text search and file search to pull in more context from a workspace. Also new in Copilot Chat, a Copilot vision capability is in preview, for attaching images and interacting with images in chat prompts. Developers could, for example, encounter an error while debugging, attach a screenshot of VS Code, and ask Copilot to help resolve the issue.
Microsoft last month introduced an experimental agent mode for Copilot Edits in VS Code Insiders. With the VS Code 1.98 release, the company has made several UX improvements. Agent mode enables Copilot to automatically search a developer’s workspace for relevant context, edit files, check for errors, and run terminal commands. With the UX improvements, terminal commands now are shown inline, so users can more easily keep track of which commands were run, and users now can edit the suggested terminal command in the chat response before running it.
Visual Studio Code 1.98 follows Visual Studio Code 1.97, which also featured Copilot accommodations. Elsewhere in VS Code 1.98:
- Terminal IntelliSense, in preview, improves terminal shell completions across bash, zsh, fish, and PowerShell by adding completion specs, refining command-line parsing, and enhancing folder and file completions.
- For the editor, the peek view now supports drag-and-drop. Entries can be dragged from their tree and opened in separate editors.
- For the workbench, the custom title bar now is enabled by default on Linux.
- An experimental commit hook feature prompts a user if there are any unresolved diagnostics for changed files.
- For Copilot, an enhanced context for inline completions and /fix commands in TypeScript files is available in an experimental mode in Insider releases. It can be enabled with the
chat.languageContext.typescript.enabledsetting.
