Step 1, install VS Code Insider version

For now, this is still an experimental feature and rumor says it will be available in June in official release. You can follow this Link to download the insider version.

Step 2, ssh passwordless login (authentication with key)

You can use different methods to generate a pair of ssh keys and save them in

C:\users\yourusername\.ssh

as id_dsa and id_dsa.pub. Then find a way to insert the content of id_dsa.pub into authorized_keys file on the remote server which can be found at

/home/yourname/.ssh/authorized_keys

Step 3, configure the ssh session in VS Code

You can either press F1 then select “Remote-SSH: connect to Host” then configure or you can just edit C:\users\yourusername\.ssh\config file with the following content

Host a_name_for_host
    HostName hostname
    User login_name

Note that you can configure multiple hosts inside this file.

Step 4, Connect to Host

Press F1 in VS Code and connect to Remote Host and it will automatically install VS Code server. Then you can open the folder on the host start coding. This method supports auto auto conmpletion and other C++ intellisense features!

To be continued with remote debugging

There are two reasons I wanted to try out VS Code. One is C++ Intellisense. The other one is debugging. Arguably Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code has the best user friendly debugging UI. I will try the remote debugger and documentn that in a later post.

Note that only bash is supported.

Reference:

VS Code Remote Development