Microsoft's GitHub Releases 'Visual Studio Code' Extension Allowing Editing Without Cloning Repositories

A new extension for Microsoft's code-editing tool, Visual Studio Code, "allows you to open, edit, and commit back to source-control repos without having to clone them on your local machine," explains a new video. A Microsoft blog post calls it "a new experience that we've been building in partnership with our friends at GitHub to enable working with source code repositories quickly and safely inside VS Code."In VS Code, we've offered integrated support for Git from the very beginning, and we've been supporting many other source control management (SCM) providers through extensions. This has allowed developers to clone and work with repositories directly within VS Code. However, a large part of what developers do every day involves reading other people's code: reviewing pull requests, browsing open-source repositories, experimenting with new technologies or projects, inspecting upstream dependencies to debug applications, etc. What all of these have in common is that as a first step, you usually clone the repository locally and then open the code in your favorite code editor (which we hope is VS Code!). Yet, cloning a repository takes time, may lead you to review an outdated version of the repo if you forget to pull, and can sometimes be a security risk if you're unfamiliar with the code. The new Remote Repositories extension, published by GitHub, makes the experience of opening source code repositories in VS Code instant and safe. With this, you can quickly browse, search, edit, and commit to any remote GitHub repository (and soon, Azure Repos) directly from within VS Code, no clone necessary! You can work on as many repos as you like without having to save any source code on your machine. Remote Repositories saves you time and local disk space and empowers you to stay entirely within VS Code for all your source control tasks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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