Microsoft updates VS Code with native M1 Mac support

Apple’s M1 Mac users are running the newest ARM-based Apple Silicon chipset, which means that many applications still do not have native support for the processor As a result, code for these apps does not run natively on Macs with the M1 chip, although that is slowly changing with apps like VLC and Microsoft Office.

Microsoft has now added support for Apple Silicon Macs with the arrival of version 1.54 of Visual Studio Code, according to a report by iMore, which means the software can now run natively on Apple’s new chipset and utilise the resources to the maximum while saving a lot of battery.

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This is good news for those developers who own M1 Macs and were previously using Rosetta as a “translation layer” so that apps (like Visual Studio Code) that were not optimised for the new chipset could still be run. However, running apps in Rosetta means they are essentially being put in an emulator and performance in these scenarios is always subpar when compared to natively supported software.

“We are happy to announce our first release of stable Apple Silicon builds this iteration. Users on Macs with M1 chips can now use VS Code without emulation with Rosetta and will notice better performance and longer battery life when running VS Code. Thanks to the community for self-hosting with the Insiders build and reporting issues early in the iteration,” the company said in an update.

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The new February update also adds support for themeable icons, persistent terminal processes, improvements to timeline view and keyboard navigation, a guide to troubleshooting extensions, and several more improvements. Users can download the latest version of Visual Code from Microsoft’s website for free and the unified binary will work on both Intel Macs as well as Apple’s M1 Macs, according to the company.