You may have seen my post about installing FileZilla on a Chromebook and therefore needing to actually be able to edit the files that exist on your server. I’ll show you how to do that in this short article.
In my everyday life, I have been using Atom for quite a few years now, but after I started switching to Chromebook / Linux, I have to look for other solutions, as Atom does not work very well on these solutions. My choice has therefore landed on Visual Studio Code, which is very similar to Atom and can do pretty much the same, it is very similar to Codeanywhere which I have been using until recently for a year ( stopped using it due to stability issues with them ).
Before you get started, make sure you have Linux installed on your Chromebook, if you don’t, follow the steps in this article: FileZilla on a Chromebook
Step-by-step on how to install Visual Studio code on a Chromebook
- Open the Linux terminal by opening the menu (bottom left corner) and typing “Terminal”. Once the terminal is open select your installation, it is probably just called “penguin”.
- You should now see a terminal where you can enter the various commands you need. Enter the command:
- sudo apt-get update and wait for the list update to finish. This is just to make sure you have the latest list of programs you can install.
- The next thing you need is to install GNOME Keyring, which is a program designed to store security information ( usernames, passwords, and keys ) in a secure way. Install it with the command: sudo apt-get install -y gnome-keyring
- Now you just need to figure out which version of Visual Studio Code you need, you do that by typing the command: dpkg –print-architecture Which gives you the type of processor your machine has. In my case, it is an ARM64.
- Click on the link here: https://code.visualstudio.com/download and select the version of Visual Studio Code Linux version that matches your processor. If you have AMD or Intel, choose the one called .deb 64 and if you have ARM64, choose the one called .deb ARM64.
- Once you have downloaded the file open it and you will now begin the installation of Visual Studio Code on your Chromebook/Linux subsystem.
Once you have completed these steps, you will probably want to associate Visual Studio Code with your Filezilla as the default editor. To do this, open FileZilla, and select Edit -> Preferences. At the bottom, you will find File Type Associations where you may / may not see a list of files.
In this list, enter all the file types you want to be opened with Visual Studio Code. Here is a list of examples:
. /bin/code %f
css /bin/code %f
html /bin/code %f
ico /bin/code %f
js /bin/code %f
json /bin/code %f
log /bin/code %f
mca /bin/code %f
php /bin/code %f
sbc /bin/code %f
sh /bin/code %f
txt /bin/code %f
yml /bin/code %f