In this article, I will take you through the steps to install MS Visual Studio Code on macOS(Big Sur 11) using brew. Microsoft Visual Studio Code is a free and open source code editor made by Microsoft for Windows, Linux and macOS. It is quite popular among the developers and programmers community due to its support of wide variety of features including debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, code refactoring, and embedded Git. It almost provides all the features a developer could ask for in a code editor. It has lot many other features which can be checked on its official website.

How to Install MS Visual Studio Code on macOS(Big Sur 11) using brew

Also Read: How to Install cmake on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

Although you can download and install Microsoft Visual Studio Code from official website but many times it might be possible that you won't get any option to download and install the software package from the browser and the only way available to you is through terminal. In those scenarios brew package manager can become very handy to install the application through terminal. To install Visual Studio Code editor through terminal, you just need to use brew install --cask visual-studio-code command as shown below.

cyberithub@n1ams2p9089 ~ % brew install --cask visual-studio-code
Running `brew update --auto-update`...
==> Auto-updated Homebrew!
Updated 1 tap (homebrew/core).
==> New Formulae
agg    distrobox     echidna    ghorg    kalign   kubesess

You have 3 outdated formulae installed.
You can upgrade them with brew upgrade
or list them with brew outdated

==> Tapping homebrew/cask
Cloning into '/usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-cask'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 669355, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (217/217), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (145/145), done.
remote: Total 669355 (delta 110), reused 177 (delta 72), pack-reused 669138
Receiving objects: 100% (669355/669355), 318.07 MiB | 1.85 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (474770/474770), done.
Updating files: 100% (4115/4115), done.
Tapped 4054 casks (4,126 files, 339.4MB).
==> Downloading https://update.code.visualstudio.com/1.71.0/darwin/stable
==> Downloading from https://az764295.vo.msecnd.net/stable/784b0177c56c607789f9638da7b6bf3230d47a8c/VSCode-darwin.zip
####################################################################### 100.0%
==> Installing Cask visual-studio-code
==> Moving App 'Visual Studio Code.app' to '/Applications/Visual Studio Code.app'
==> Linking Binary 'code' to '/usr/local/bin/code'
    visual-studio-code was successfully installed!

Similarly, once you are done with the code editor, you can choose to uninstall it from your system by using brew uninstall --cask visual-studio-code command as shown below.

cyberithub@n1ams2p9089 ~ % brew uninstall --cask visual-studio-code
==> Uninstalling Cask visual-studio-code
==> Backing App 'Visual Studio Code' up to '/usr/local/Caskroom/visual-studio-code/1.71.0/Visual Studio Code.app'
==> Removing App '/Applications/Visual Studio Code.app'
==> Unlinking Binary '/usr/local/bin/code'
==> Purging files for version 1.71.0 of Cask visual-studio-code