The new CLI is able to establish a secure tunnel between VS Code for the Web, also known as v, and your remote machine, so you can use v as a frontend to your own VS Code Server running on your premises or in the Cloud. Visual Studio Code Server CLI, named code-server, differs from the standard code CLI that you normally use on your desktop machine. VS Code Server is a service built off the same underlying server used by the remote extensions, plus some additional functionality, like an interactive CLI and facilitating secure connections to v.

With Visual Studio Code Server, Microsoft aims to simplify the overall process of installing, managing, and connecting to your 'remote' instance. While the Remote Extensions already enabled to code 'remotely' using a local VS Code frontend, that requires dealing with SSH or HTTPS configuration, which admittedly is not entirely desirable. Conceptually, the front end (where you type your code) runs in one process and a backend service (which hosts extensions, the terminal, debugging, etc.) runs in a separate process.

We can do this because VS Code is, by design, a multi-process application. That is quite a lot of flexibility for a code editor, which is possible thanks to Visual Studio Code architecture: The journey started in 2019 with the introduction of the VS Code Remote Development extensions and led later to the introduction of GitHub Codespaces, which quickly became GitHub default development platform. Visual Studio Code Server is another move in Microsoft's journey to enable remote development based on its popular editor.

Visual Studio Code Server can be installed everywhere and easily used through VS Code for the Web running in a browser. Microsoft has announced a private preview of the backend service that powers its Visual Studio Code editor, along with a specific CLI to manage it.

Previews free visual studio code web