Visual Studio Code announce new monthly 1.97 release! Here are new features in the IDE release.

VS Code 1.97 is the first release in 2025. It added two more models OpenAI’s o3-mini and Gemini 2.0 Flash to choose from when using Copilot.

It introduced new Copilot Next Edit Suggestions (Copilot NES) preview feature to help with edits. Which, can both predicts the location of the next edit you’ll want to make and what that edit should be.

The release also announced the general availability of Copilot Edits. Which is optimized for code editing and enables you to make code changes across multiple files in your workspace, directly from chat.

Other changes to Github Copilot include new setting for automatically accepting edit suggestions after a configurable timeout, temporal context helps when editing or generating code by informing the language model about files that you have recently interacted with, as well as:

• New status indicator in the Status Bar shows the type of index being used by Copilot.
• New ways to upgrade a project to a remote index.
• Background updating of changed files in the local index, and optimized the basic index for large projects.
• Reference files modified in Git source control using #changes context variable.
• The editor controls for edits remain visible when switching to the side-by-side view.

In the new IDE release, when installing an extension from a publisher for the first time, it will pop-up a dialog to ask either trust & install or cancel. And, trust the publisher will also trust the dependency publishers.

The release also adds ability to move the Command Palette and other Quick Inputs to a new position, instead of having it fixed at the top of the window, adds ability to filter the contents of the output panel via security level, category, or specific text, and supports viewing multiple logs in a single compound log view, which can be created by using the Create Compound Log... action in the overflow menu of the Output panel.

For Linux, the release introduced an experimental feature to enable the custom title bar. User can try it out by manually configuring window.titleBarStyle as custom.

Other changes in VS Code 1.97 include:

• Option to ignore code blocks in text to speech
• Export and import logs using the actions in the overflow menu of the Output view.
• Two new filter options in the Extensions view, @outdated and @recentlyUpdated.
• Preview SVG with built-in image preview.
• New --remove command-line option to remove a root folder from a multi-root workspace.
• Extend history persistence to the replace input control.
• New Open on GitHub command to repositories hosted on Github.
• Ligature support is now considered stable.
• Support the ESC ] 9 ; 4 escape sequence pioneered by ConEmu to report progress in the terminal.
• New ${columnNumber} variable to refer to the column number of the cursor position.
• TypeScipt 5.7.3.
• Get Ruby grammar from Shopify/ruby-lsp instead of textmate/ruby.tmbundle.
• Launch a VS Code Native REPL from your REPL in the terminal.
• Debug a Python script or module without setup

There are as well some preview features including a new agent mode for Copilot Edits, Agentic codebase search, Copilot Vision in VS Code Insiders, build, store, and share reusable prompts, and TypeScript 5.8 beta support.

How to Get Visual Studio Code 1.97

The official release note, as well as prebuilt packages for Linux, Windows, and macOS are available in its website via the link below:

For Ubuntu Linux, besides the official deb and snap packages, there’s also Flatpak package available for choice. And, here’s a step by step guide shows how to install it in Ubuntu.