install visual studio code on raspberry

COMPILING VISUAL STUDIO CODE ON A RASPBERRY PI 3

From the VS Code GitHub, you need Node, npm, and Python. The Pi has Python but it has an old node, so needed a newer node that ran on ARM processors.

get http://node-arm.herokuapp.com/node_latest_armhf.deb
sudo dpkg -i node_latest_armhf.deb

There are some NPM native modules like node-native-keymap that didn't work when I built the first time, so you'll need some supporting libraries first:

sudo apt-get install libx11-dev

Then, from my Raspberry Pi, I did this to build my own instance of VS Code.

git clone https://github.com/microsoft/vscode
cd vscode
./scripts/npm.sh install --arch=armhf

This took the Raspberry Pi 3 about 20 minutes so be patient.

Then, run your instance with ./scripts/code.sh from that same folder.

Ref http://www.hanselman.com/blog/BuildingVisualStudioCodeOnARaspberryPi3.aspx