Latest update to Microsoft’s code editor improves dictation, introduces side chats, and adds support for comments to provide agent feedback in the integrated browser.
Visual Studio Code 1.132, the latest version of Microsoft’s popular, open-source code editor, has been released. The brings improvements to built-in dictation, side chats, and support for commenting on web elements in the integrated browser.
VS Code 1.132 was released August 5. The update can be downloaded for Windows, Linux, and macOS at code.visualstudio.com.
With VS Code 1.132, the built-in multilingual dictation function lets developers dictate in multiple languages using an on-device model that follows language preference or detects the language automatically. The built-in dictation converts speech to text in chat inputs, editors, and terminals. Dictation now uses multilingual Nemotron 3.5 as the default on-device model. Plus, terminal dictation now applies shell-aware cleanup, so spoken commands preserve shell syntax.
Also in VS Code 1.132, developers can open a side chat by typing /bt in the chat input. A side chat shares the context and prompt cache of the primary chat, but allows developers to ask the agent questions about the current turn without interrupting the turn. Similarly, developers can select text in a chat response to ask contextual questions about that response.
Other new capabilities and improvements in VS Code 1.132:
- The integrated browser adds support for selecting web page elements and annotating them with agent feedback. Users can trigger this mode by using the
workbench.action.browser.addElementCommentToChatkeyboard shortcut. - Active development continues on the agent host, a new VS Code feature that lets users connect to the same agent session from multiple VS Code windows. The agent host runs agent harnesses such as Copilot, Claude, and Codex in a dedicated process based on the Agent Host Protocol (AHP).
- In the previous release, Microsoft introduced the hybrid Markdown editor, which combines rendered Markdown with in-place editing and agent-actionable comments. In this release, Markdown diffs can be opened in the hybrid Markdown editor.
- Expanded terminal output in chat now reflows to the available width as the view is resized. Previously, output used a fixed width, which caused lines to wrap too early and left unused space in wider views.
