Published on Aug 12, 2022
Visual Studio Code’s Python development team has improved the “getting started” experience for its main extension, along with many other improvements, in the monthly update for August 2022.
As well as developing and maintaining the main Python extension in the VS Code Marketplace, the team also maintains the associated Jupyter extension. It has nearly 62 million installations, making it a runaway success. It’s way ahead of the second-most popular item, Jupyter, which has 42.7 million installs. There are 35.2 million installations of the Pylance language server, another extension associated with Python.
Nevertheless, it’s the primary Python tool whose getting started experience has been improved.
Kartik Raj, a team member, explained in a blog post on Aug. 4 that the Python extension walkthrough has been improved to allow users to better install Python when needed and select it in VS Code when necessary. Choosing the ‘Install Python’ button from the walkthrough will open the Python app in the Microsoft Store on Windows. On Linux or macOS, the installation instructions will run automatically in the terminal.
“Another improvement related to the getting started experience is that notifications for selecting the interpreter are now only shown when necessary (e.g. when running or debugging a file, or when running a tool such as a linter or formatter), and not on startup. Additionally, notification prompts have been improved to provide more precise information about errors and suggested changes.”
