The Visual Studio 2026 IDE

The Workspace Layout

Visual Studio 2026 is organized into panels. The Solution Explorer (left) shows your project files. The central Editor is where you write code. The Terminal panel (bottom) runs commands. The Output panel shows build and runtime messages.

IntelliSense

As you type, VS 2026 shows suggestions, parameter hints, and inline documentation. Press Ctrl+Space to trigger IntelliSense manually.

// Type "cons" and IntelliSense suggests console.log
console.log("IntelliSense rocks!");

GitHub Copilot

Copilot appears as grey ghost text. Write a comment describing what you want and press Tab to accept the suggestion:

// Function that returns the sum of two numbers
function add(a, b) {
  return a + b;  // Copilot generated this
}

The Integrated Terminal

Open the terminal with Ctrl+`. You can run Node.js scripts, install npm packages, and run tests without leaving the IDE.

node index.js
npm install lodash

Extensions

Visit the Extensions panel (Ctrl+Shift+X) to install extras like ESLint, Prettier, and JavaScript Snippets. These extend VS 2026's built-in JavaScript support.