How to install Visual Studio Code on Arch-based Linux Distributions(Manjaro) ?

Visual Studio Code is free, powerful and one of the most popular IDE in the market. It is a cross-platform application and can be customized heavily by installing various extensions.  All the modern programming languages like C, C++, Java, Python, JavaScript, React, Node JS, etc., are all supported by it.

Features of VS Code

• Open-source
• Integrated terminal(CLI)
• Git Integration
• Task runner
• Large community
• Thousands of extensions
• Inbuilt support for multi-cursor and text-wrapping

Since VS Code is proprietary software by Microsoft Corp. and not available in the official repositories, we cannot install it using Pacman. So, this article will discuss the most common way to install VS Code on Arch/Manjaro/Chakra.

Installing VS Code

For this tutorial, we are going to use the Yay AUR helper, which is one of the many AUR helpers that can be used to install AUR packages. 

Step 1: Before installing yay, we must install the git and base-devel group packages on the system.

$ sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel git

Step 2: Now, install yay by running the following

$ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay-git.git
$ cd yay-git
$ makepkg -sri

Step 3: Verify the installation by running.

$ yay --version

Step 4: Next, install VS Code by running the following command and opt for the default package once the installation starts.

$ yay -S visual-studio-code-bin

Step 5: Finally, launch VS Code. 

Uninstalling VS Code

To uninstall VS Code and all of its config files run:

$  sudo pacman -R visual-studio-code-bin