Project History

By Lex Li

Microsoft introduced Visual Studio Code on April 29, 2015, and later released it as an open source project [1] on November 18, 2015.

An issue was opened on Nov 18, 2015 [2] to add reStructuredText support to Visual Studio Code. Lex Li responded to the issue and started to work on the initial version of this extension, with only syntax highlighting and code snippets ported from TextMate.

Inspired by the extension created by Thomas Townsend [3] , the live preview feature was added in release 0.0.7, and fully switched to Sphinx based preview engine in release 0.0.14.

Linter support was added in release 33.0.0, by reusing some code from Cody Hoover’s ruby-linter extension [4] . restructured-lint was chosen initially, and later doc8 support was added in release 53.0.0. Recently rstcheck has been chosen to replace doc8 in release 120.0.0.

Section builder was contributed by Adrien Di Mascio in release 44.0.0 [5] .

A language server project was started recently [6] to enable IntelliSense. IntelliSense was included in release 47.0.0, and was disabled by default.

Tormod Landet introduced many important pieces in June/July 2018, which boost productivity and simplified user experience [7] . The changes were shipped in release 67.0.0 and above.

noisnemid added initial outline support [8] in release 118.0.0.

A new linter named rstcheck [9] was integrated in release 120.0.0 and became the default.

Starting from release 131.0.0, the Snooty language server created by MongoDB [10] was integrated. The legacy server was removed in release 137.0.0.

List editing was ported from Yu Zhang’s extension [11] in release 143.0.0.

Table editor was ported from Tatsuya Nakamori’s extension [12] in release 158.0.0.

Starting from release 154.0.0, this extension switched to the syntax highlighting implemented by Trond Snekvik. Release 159.0.0 completely removed syntax highlighiting and recommends Trond’s extension [13] instead.

Starting from release 170.0.0, the Esbonio language server created by Alex Carney [14] was integrated. The integration with Snooty was removed. As the Esbonio project evolves quickly, this project no longer offers live preview and IntelliSense features, but recommends the Esbonio extension to be installed instead since release 190.1.17.

There are other contributors helping out with bug reports and pull requests.

Footnotes