We have official support for Visual Studio Code and we aim to provide complete end-to-end support for all actions related to ESP-IDF: namely build, flash, monitor, debug, tracing, core-dump, System Trace Viewer, etc.
The recommended way to install the ESP-IDF Visual Studio Code Extension is by downloading it from `VS Code Marketplace <https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=espressif.esp-idf-extension>`_ or following `Quick Installation Guide <https://github.com/espressif/vscode-esp-idf-extension/blob/master/docs/tutorial/install.md>`_.
Review the `tutorials <https://github.com/espressif/vscode-esp-idf-extension/blob/master/docs/tutorial/toc.md>`_ for the ESP-IDF Visual Studio Code Extension to learn how to use all of the features.
***Setup**, will help you to quickly install ESP-IDF and its relevant toolchain with just a few clicks.
***Build**, with one-click build and multi-target build, you can easily build and deploy your applications.
***Flash**, with both UART and JTAG flash out-of-the-box.
***Monitoring**, comes with a built-in terminal, you can trigger IDF Monitor Commands from within VS Code as you are used to in traditional terminals.
***Debugging**, with out-of-the-box hardware `debugging <https://github.com/espressif/vscode-esp-idf-extension/blob/master`_
***GUI Menu Config**, provides a simplified UI for configuring your chip.
***App & Heap Tracing**, provides support for collecting traces from your application, and a simplified UI for analyzing them.
***System View Tracing Viewer**, aims to read and display the *.svdat* files into the trace UI (we also support multiple core tracing views).
***IDF Size Analysis Overview** presents a UI for binary size analysis.
***Rainmaker Cloud**, inbuilt Rainmaker Cloud support where you can edit/read the state of your connected IoT devices easily. For more information see the `ESP Rainmaker <https://rainmaker.espressif.com/>`_ page.
***Code Coverage**, inbuilt code coverage support with color highlights showing which lines have been covered. The HTML report redners directly inside the IDE.
If you face an issue with certain feature of VS Code or VS Code in general we recommend you ask your question in the `forum <http://esp32.com/viewforum.php?f=40>`_, or open a `GitHub Issue <https://github.com/espressif/vscode-esp-idf-extension/issues/new/choose>`_ for our dev teams to review.
We also welcome new feature requests. Most of the features we have today are a result of people asking for them to be implemented. To improve certain aspects of the extension, `raise your feature request on GitHub <http://github.com/espressif/vscode-esp-idf-extension/issues/new/choose>`_.
