August 1, 2022

New ports explorer, changelog view, and connection improvements for VS Code

Users of the latest release could notice that we were working on improvements to VS Code Browser and Desktop. Now they are available in stable release as well via VS Code settings. Key highlights are:

• Connection improvements for VS Code Desktop to bring stability and performance.
• New ports explorer in VS Code Browser to align interface with VS Code Desktop.
• Latest changelog view in VS Code to access the latest changelog directly from VS Code Browser or Desktop.

You can enable Latest Release in your preferences and try the latest updates as soon as they are available.

Connection improvements for VS Code Desktop

We developed a new SSH connection mode for VS Code Desktop which brings stability and performance improvements. This mode can be enabled by setting gitpod.remote.useLocalApp to false in VS Code settings and will be enabled by default in future releases.

You can learn more about new the approach in its announcement blog post. If you’re short of time:

1. Connection has improved stability, with fewer disconnections
2. Approach doesn’t overwrite the remote.SSH.configFile
3. No additional binary downloads required or background processes
4. Fewer requests from VS Code to accept the SSH fingerprint
5. Improved operating system support via OpenSSH

New ports explorer in VS Code Browser

We developed a new ports explorer in VS Code Browser to align the interface with VS Code Desktop. You can enable, or disable it via the gitpod.experimental.portsView.enabled in VS Code settings. Give the feature a try and we’d love to hear your feedback.

Latest changelog view in VS Code

The new VS Code command Gitpod: Show Release Notes let you access latest changelog directly from VS Code Browser or Desktop.

Fixes and improvements

• gp has now a new timeout namespace letting you to show and extend timeout of a running workspace.
• #11642 - [local-preview] Add separated anonymous telemetry
• #11592 - [dashboard] Replace workspace search alert
• #11652 - [dashboard] Fix persistence of checkbox values on settings page
• #11698 - [kots]: put the “run” collectors into the active namespace
• #11630 - [server] fix: new project widget broken if ‘null’ item(s) received from gh api
• #11543 - [server] Send error message on 401 errors
• #10731 - [.gitpod.yml generator] Use ‘pnpm’ package manager when there is a pnpm-lock.yaml file or the package.json specifies it
• #11491 - Check the following in cgroup v1/v2Eliminate dockerd rootless mode in cgroup v2
• #11604 - Update docker compose to v2.7.0