Remote Repositories

Remote Repositories

The new Remote Repositories extension, published by GitHub, makes the experience of opening source code repositories in VS Code instant and safe. With this, you can quickly browse, search, edit, and commit to any remote GitHub repository (and soon, Azure Repos) directly from within VS Code, no clone necessary!

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Remote Repositories helps you stay on the latest version of your repos every time, without any complex Git commands.

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When you commit changes, they'll automatically show up on GitHub – you don't need to push your changes or publish any new branches you create.

Limitations:

There are certain limitations while working with Remote Repositories:

  • Debugging, terminals, and tasks - Not currently supported. Terminals open on your local file system and don't have access to the virtual file system of the remote repository.

  • Limited language intelligence - Features like IntelliSense and Go to Definition may be impacted as many languages don't yet understand the virtualized environment of Remote Repositories.

  • Search - GitHub search itself has limitations, such as not indexing branches. Remote Repositories can avoid this limitation and perform a full-text search by enabling indexing. Indexing pulls a shallow clone of the repository from GitHub and performs a full search locally, providing greater power than GitHub's fuzzy default-branch native search. You can enable indexing in Remote Repositories from the Search view.

  • Extension limitations - Not all extensions can support running in a virtual workspace, but more extensions will support it over time. Extensions that depend heavily on access to local files cannot support this setup. See the virtual workspace section below for more details.