I’ve been working on an art project that requires a little frontend development. As a result I’ve been exploring modern front-end tooling / workflows, and stumbled upon Microsoft’s awesome VS Code.

Visual Studio Code is based on Github’s Electron, which is based on Chromium. I looked into Atom but my main issue with it was speed: it was a bit on the sluggish side once I got a bunch of plugins installed.

So I installed VS Code on my mbp, installed some plugins (+vim bindings) and really enjoyed using it. Then I went to install it on ubuntu…

Only to find that no proper package / ppa is available. Instead, I was pointed to this new thing by Canonical called “ubuntu make” that is a specialized installer for various ides / programming tools?

At any rate if you’re trying to figure out how to install VS Code on Ubuntu, here are the commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-desktop/ubuntu-make
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-make
umake ide visual-studio-code

It’s sort of weird to me that ubuntu-make is a thing, but I guess it makes sense if people aren’t going to take the time to properly package their apps.