NativeScript for Visual Studio Code

The NativeScript extension for Visual Studio Code is a great way to accelerate your NativeScript development workflow. With Intellisense, interactive debugging and integration with device emulators, the NativeScript extension for Visual Studio Code provides the most feature complete environment for NativeScript Development. Perhaps the best feature of all, it’s free!

Download Extension

Extension Home

The latest release is located at the Visual Studio Marketplace page for NativeScript. Our work is open source. The repository is located at the NativeScript for Visual Studio Code on GitHub. User documentation is also available on GitHub.

Installation

From Visual Studio Code:

Hit F1 or Cmd+Shift+P to bring up the command palette
Type "Install Extension"
Choose NativeScript Extension from the dropdown.

From the Visual Studio Marketplace:

You can also manually download and install the NativeScript extension from the Visual Studio Marketplace.

Documentation

View the Docs

Why use our Visual Studio Code Plugin?

Free! (Beer and Speech)

The NativeScript for VC Code extension is free as in beer and free as in speech. This means you can use the extension however you please and not pay us a dime. Plus, the entire project is open source and available on GitHub.

Windows, Mac and Linux

VS Code runs on Windows, Mac and Linux letting you switch environments or standardize across your team even if team member use a different host platform than you do. Write NativeScript applications on the platform you feel most productive with. Whichever platform you choose, VS Code has a snappy, quick feel.

Faster Debugging

Of course none of us write perfect bug free code on the first try.We need an efficient way to evaluate, test and debug our code. By using the NativeScript Visual Studio Code tool, you get an proper debugging environment complete with breakpoints (even conditional breakpoints), run time call stack and variable inspection as well as the ability to pause or step through code execution. Leave your console.log() debugging in the past and get more done quicker with our debugging features. Wanna see the power first hand? Watch this 5 minute video on Debugging with NativeScript for VS Code.

Rich Intellisense

Sure to be your favorite feature, NativeScript Visual Studio Code gives you Intellisense. This means you will get prompts on language features and contextually aware local code. No more digging around looking for method signatures, you can relax with ease and focus on reading less, and writing more.

Integrated Version Control

Keep avoiding context switching! Simply start up the version control from the Viewbar on left, point to your Git repo and off you go. VS Code will track files for changes and offer stage/unstage/commit actions for your code. If there are conflicts, VS Code will flag issues so you can resolve conflicts before committing changes.

Emulator Integration

Avoid context switching! The NativeScript Visual Studio Code extension integrates the command shell directly with the emulators allowing you to stay in VS to test and debug your applications.

Found a Tip or Trick that should be here? Tweet us at @nativescript and let us know!

Tips

Here is a list of handy keybindings for Visual Studio Code
Use conditional breakpoints to selectively pause running code by Right-Clicking click the line number of a given line, choose "Add Conditional Breakpoint" from the menu and typing the condition in the input field.
Ditch console.log(). See how in this 5 minute video on debugging NativeScript with Visual Studio Code.
Want to use the latest version? As of version 0.2.0, NativeScript for Visual Studio Code will tell you when there is a new update. Not yet on 0.2.0? Here's how to manually update!

Tricks

Context switching is a productivity killer. VS Code is designed to minimize as many context switches as possible. Suppose you need to look at a function definition. Rather than switch contexts from your current file to the one you need to reference, you can just use the peek capability of VS Code. Just Right Click and a lightweight view of the desired file will appear inline. Hit the escape key, and the peek information will disappear..