HOW TO SETUP VISUAL STUDIO CODE IN MOBILE PHONES

Visual Studio Code is a free source-code editor made by Microsoft for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS. It has various features that include support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, code refactoring, and embedded Git. In VS Code, users can change the theme, keyboard shortcuts, preferences, and install extensions that add additional functionality. It is based on the Electron framework which is built on top of a Chromium engine; this is versatile, allowing it to work on any Operating System.

In mobile devices, if you simply search for VS Code in your app store, you will not find it there because it is based on electron which means it can only adjust to frameworks and doesn’t work for mobile devices. So we need an approach in order to make this work.

There are some great solutions out there already, which are actually easy to set up. Things like remote desktop, where you can set up may be TeamViewer or Anydesk and even GitHub is trying to create a new solution on its own, which is known as Codespaces. This will also allow you to work remotely in your own GitHub repository without any code editor.

But these things aren’t the reasons for you to be here. So, let’s understand how to set up VS Code on your mobile devices.

HOW TO SETUP VS CODE IN MOBILE PHONES

Here, we will see how to setup VS Code on mobile phone and start developing websites via Wi-Fi or Internet.

This is possible to do from any location, on any devices such as an iPad, iPhone, Android or tablet phones.

This would be really fun!

Using VS Code on any devices requires it to be accessible on the browser.

• To do this, we use a package called code-server which can be found on GitHub.

Link to Code Server : https://github.com/cdr/code-server

This allows us to access our physical machine remotely via the web, which VS Code will be running on.

Since VS Code works on Electron, so, it’s not normally accessible on platforms outside of a desktop.

It can be done with the following two steps:

1. Installation:

curl -fsSL https://code-server.dev/install.sh | sh

2. Then bring it online:

code-server — link

However, this allows you to perform web development through the browser. In my opinion, this is a great way to start doing web dev on your phone.

This setup can also be done through workspaces or even through your own cloud server via Amazon or Google Cloud platform even if you don’t have a physical machine.

Be aware that security is a must for this implementation, as your system is accessible remotely, so you must use SSL, have passwords, etc. for the security purpose.

If you want to dive deep into this setup process, you can check Adrian Twarog’s YouTube video “VS Code on my Phone for Website Dev… (How I did it)”. He has this amazing video which has covered everything about the setup process in detail.

You can access this video by clicking on the link that is given below:

If you are interested in web dev then using VS Code on your mobile devices would be great for you and also you will enjoy the process. So, you should give it a try.

Keep exploring…
Stay Safe
Peace out!!