Visual Studio Code 1.80 arrives with terminal image support

Microsoft has announced the availability of Visual Studio Code 1.80, also known as the June 2023 update, despite being released in July. In this update, the integrated terminal can now display images directly, there are accessibility improvements, and more.

Image support in the terminal was a preview feature in the previous VSCode release but is now switched on by default. To display images in the terminal, the image pixel data is converted to text before being written to the terminal via a special escape sequence.

Right now, the terminal supports the sixel and iTerm inline image protocols. To give the feature a go, you can download a .six file from the libsixel repo and use the cat command in the terminal followed by the filename.

If you want to pass a typical PNG, GIF, or JPEG file to the terminal, you’ll need to install the imgcat python package and then run imgcat followed by the filename in the terminal.

With regard to the accessibility improvements, Microsoft has added a new command (Alt+F2) to open Accessible View. This view allows screen reader users to inspect content character by character and line by line. Copilot audio cues are also included in this release.

The list of changes in this update is shown below:

• Accessibility improvements - Accessible View for better screen reader support, Copilot audio cues.
• Better editor group and tab resizing - Set min tab size, avoid unnecessary editor group resizing.
• Skip subwords when expanding selection - Control whether to use camel case for selection.
• Terminal image support - Display images directly in the integrated terminal.
• Python extensions for mypy and debugpy - For Python type checking and debugging in VS Code.
• Remote connections to WSL - Connect to WSL instances on remote machines using Tunnels.
• Preview: GitHub Copilot create workspace/notebook - Quickly scaffold projects and notebooks.
• New C# in VS Code documentation - Learn about C# development with the C# Dev Kit extension.

To get the latest update, just open up VSCode then go to Help > Check for updates. You can also download a fresh installer from the Visual Studio Code website.

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