The release of the GitLab 15.0 collaborative development platform has been announced, and the intention in future releases is to replace the built-in Web IDE code editor with the Visual Studio Code (VS Code) editor developed by Microsoft with the participation of the community. Using the VS Code editor will simplify the development of projects in the GitLab interface and allow developers to use a familiar and full-featured code editing tool.
A survey of GitLab users showed that the Web IDE is great for making small changes, but few people use it for full-fledged coding. The GitLab developers tried to understand what hinders full-fledged work in the Web IDE, and came to the conclusion that it was not the lack of any specific features, but a combination of minor flaws in the interface and working methods. According to a survey conducted by Stack Overflow, more than 70% of developers use the VS Code editor, which comes under the MIT license, when writing code.
One of the GitLab engineers prepared a working prototype of the VS Code integration with the GitLab interface, which can be used to work through the browser. The GitLab management considered the development promising and decided to replace the Web IDE with VS Code, which would also allow not to waste resources on adding features to the Web IDE that are already in VS Code.
In addition to significant functionality and usability enhancements, the transition will provide access to a wide range of add-ons to VS Code, as well as provide users with the ability to customize skins and control syntax highlighting. Since the introduction of VS Code will inevitably lead to the complexity of the editor, for those who need the most simple editor to make individual edits, it is planned to add the necessary editing capabilities to the basic components, such as Web Editor, Snippets and Pipeline Editor.
As for the release of GitLab 15.0, the added innovations include:
- Added visual Markdown (WYSIWYG) editing mode to Wiki.
- The free community version integrates the functions of scanning container images for known vulnerabilities in the dependencies used.
- Implemented support for adding internal notes to discussions that are available only to the author and members of the group (for example, to attach confidential data to an issue that cannot be disclosed publicly).
- Ability to link an issue to an external organization or external contacts.
- Support for nested environment variables in CI/CD (variables can be nested within other variables, eg "MAIN_DOMAIN: ${STACK_NAME}.example.com").
- The ability to subscribe and unsubscribe from the user in his profile.
- The process of revoking access tokens has been simplified.
- The ability to reorganize the list with issue descriptions in drag&drop mode has been provided.
- The GitLab Workflow add-on to VS Code adds the ability to work with multiple accounts associated with different GitLab users.
Source: opennet.ru