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Yes. The VS Code editor itself is free for personal and commercial use on Linux, macOS, and Windows, and the underlying Code - OSS project is open source under the MIT license. However, AI features powered by GitHub Copilot require a separate Copilot subscription (with a free tier offering limited usage).
Visual Studio Code is a lightweight, cross-platform, extensible code editor focused on fast editing and broad language support. Visual Studio is a full-featured IDE primarily for Windows (with a macOS variant, now discontinued) targeting .NET, C++, and enterprise development with deeper tooling for those stacks. Despite the shared name, they are distinct products.
Through GitHub Copilot, VS Code offers inline code completions, Copilot Chat for natural-language Q&A about your code, inline edit suggestions, agent mode for multi-step autonomous tasks across files and the terminal, test generation, and code explanation. Multiple underlying AI models can be selected for different tasks.
Yes. VS Code supports Remote-SSH, Dev Containers, and Windows Subsystem for Linux so you can edit code on remote machines as if it were local. It also integrates with GitHub Codespaces, which provides fully cloud-hosted, browser-accessible development environments preconfigured for your repository.
VS Code ships with built-in support for JavaScript, TypeScript, JSON, HTML, CSS, and Markdown, and offers first-class extensions for Python, Go, Rust, C/C++, C#, Java, PHP, Ruby, and many more. Through the Language Server Protocol and the marketplace, virtually every modern programming language has rich IntelliSense and debugging support.
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Last verified March 2026