The substructure is missing and is therefore not a real IDE. However, both browser editors have one thing in common: you can code wonderfully on the go, but you cannot start the projects and thus also not validate your own code for executability. A variant of this is v, which can open not only GitHub projects, but any from your own hard drive. For those who like to try it out, just go to any GitHub repository and hit the DOT key and the project will open in a VS Code browser window.

For example, it wasn’t until 2020, 2 years after Microsoft acquired GitHub, that they announced v, which is just a call target for the newly introduced Magic Dot and opens a project hosted on GitHub in the browser. Surprisingly however is already, that although VS Code is based on Web technologies, it took some years, until the editor made it out of its Electron cardboard, directly into the Browser. It is not really surprising that the developers have built a really good editor from the start, which could directly defy the first Chromium-based tool Brackets from Adobe at that time, because Erich Gamma was the head of the development environment Eclipse for many years and therefore knows about the needs of the worldwide developer community.

HTML, CSS and Javascript, packaged and executed using the framework Electron developed by GitHub, which in turn is based on Node.js and the open source browser engine Chromium from Google. The exciting thing about Monaco and VS Code is, that it is consistently written using web technologies, i.e.

It all started with the Monaco Editor, the core around which VS Code is built and which was first released on April 14, 2016. The company from Redmond has done quite a lot right with the tool and has gathered a large group of open source developers around it (currently 1,640 contributors), who contribute to the fact that the Swiss Microsoft team around Erich Gamma can bring out a new release for Windows, Linux and macOS every few weeks. It’s amazing how quickly the editor Visual Studio Code (VS Code) has conquered the developer community (#1 in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey Ranking 2021) and even those from the Linux faction, who are historically rather critical of Microsoft, but for good reason.

Visual studio code github online