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VS Code 1.142 Brings Canvases and a Smarter Markdown Editor

Chat gets a live whiteboard, and Markdown writers get the editing comforts they have been missing.

Picture asking your AI assistant to plan a sprint and getting back not a wall of text but a live Kanban board you can both edit side by side. That is the idea behind the most eye-catching addition in Visual Studio Code 1.142, and it is only one of several changes landing this month.

Canvases take shape

Canvases, currently in preview, are interactive visual surfaces that open next to the chat panel. You and the agent work on the same artifact, a task board being the showcase example, instead of trading snippets back and forth. To try it, switch on the chat.canvases.enabled setting. Related to this, you can now move a chat into another folder or a fresh Git worktree and keep the whole conversation along for the ride, though for now that only works for Codex sessions with a single chat and one local folder.

The humble Markdown editor gets love

If you write documentation in VS Code, this part is for you. You can paste images straight into a Markdown file, rename file links with F2, jump around with the Outline view and breadcrumbs, and copy code blocks with a hover button. The model picker has also been redesigned, with separate tabs for Copilot and bring-your-own-key models plus settings for thinking level and context window.

Odds and ends

The Copilot harness starts rolling out as the default for new sessions, with a read-only Ask agent returning. Individual background shells can now be stopped from the chat view, and stacked pull requests are switched on by default in the GitHub Pull Requests extension. Administrators gain tools to enforce agent sandboxing and permission policies. One heads-up: sandboxing on Windows for the Local harness is now deprecated.

Our verdict

Developers who live in chat-driven workflows will have the most fun here, and anyone writing Markdown daily gets real quality-of-life gains. If AI features are not your thing, the update is still routine and safe, so let it install itself. Teams that rely on Windows sandboxing for the Local harness should read the deprecation note before they roll it out widely.

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I am a technology writer for UpdateStar, covering software, security, and privacy as well as research and innovation in information security. I worked as an editor for German computer magazines for more than a decade before starting to be a team member at UpdateStar.

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