How to make VS code insiders terminal command shorter

Since from last year, I slowly switch most of my daily development utilities from stable to beta version to enjoy the latest features and earlier bug fixes. So far, the experience is not that bad comparing to use stable version. Most of the utilities are able to install side by side without too much impact on my daily usage except Visual Studio Code Insiders. In this short blog post, I’ll show you my way to shorten the terminal command on both Windows and OSX.

Before you start to tweak the alias, you first need to make sure install code-insiders command in PATH. Start Visual Studio Insiders, Open Command Palette from view menu

Type Insiders in the command palette search bar, and choose Shell Command : Install 'code-insiders' command in PATH

Once the above is done, open terminal (OSX) / Dos prompt (Windows), type code-insiders, this will launch Visual Studio Code Insiders from terminal.

The next step is to change code-insiders to c.

Windows

1. Create a folder (e.g. tools under c drive) and add it to your PATH environment variable, so you can access the command from prompt (Dos/Powershell).
2. Download 32 bit/64 bit version batch file and save into the the new folder you created in step 1.
3. Open a new Dos/Powershell prompt, type c, and it will launch Visual Studio Code Insiders.

OSX

1. Use your preferable editor to open .bash_profile file.
2. Add an alias alias c='code-insiders' in your alias section, if you don’t have separate alias section, just add it to the end.
3. Save changes, go back to terminal type source ~/.bash_profile to reload your updated bash profile.
4. Type c in terminal this time, it will launch Visual Studio Code Insiders.

Happy Coding! 😇