Access VS Code from your phone browser...
Idrees Khan
Posted on May 22, 2020
So in my last post I explained how to use your phone as a development machine. But this time I want to show you, how you can access your code from your phone browser.
How it works ?
Basically you will host your PC (probably at office or another home device) and then access it from home via phone or any other device. For this you will need a PC (where you should have already installed VS Code) and a Microsoft account. First you will need to install Remote Development Extension published by Microsoft.
After installation, open a project that you want to access and go to Remote Explorer and Double click on Register self-hosted Codespace (as shown in below image), select subscription, resource group, region, a plan and finally name this Codespace. Don't worry its free 😜 as mentioned here.
After downloading some dependencies (in my case) and setups at Microsoft cloud, you should see your Codespace as shown below 😉:
Connect it!
Perfect, all you need to do now is to grab your phone and plug it to a monitor with keyboard and mouse and go to https://online.visualstudio.com/environments. There you will see the Codespace that you named it in previous steps (in my case ik-surface-pro). Click on those dots and select Connect.
Thats it 😍, after a while you have now access to your code from a browser, which means from anywhere! 😉
Gotchas
While this all sounds cool but please note that the experience isn't perfect but it is nearly perfect. Also in mobile (specially in Android) as you touch VS Code, the screen will be zoomed in. For that I used Firefox Focus browser. You might need to try different browsers and see which one works best.
Posted on May 22, 2020
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