Microsoft has announced the first public preview of Visual Studio Code, a free cross-platform developer’s editor for Windows, Mac and Linux.

As you’d expect with this kind of tool, there’s syntax highlighting, autocompletion, bracket matching and similar support for a lot of languages: C++, jade, PHP, Python, XML, Batch, F#, DockerFile, Coffee Script, Java, HandleBars, R, Objective-C, PowerShell, Luna, Visual Basic, Markdown, JavaScript, JSON, HTML, CSS, LESS, SASS, C# and TypeScript, with more to come,

That may sound much like many other Notepad replacements, but then Code goes much further. It can validate JavaScript files according to your preferred rules, preview Markdown files, show colour preview annotations for CSS, LESS and SASS, and gives you IntelliSense, intelligent refactoring, “find all references” and more.

A spectacular cross-platform development tool

Oh, and did we mention a debugger for JavaScript? Git support? Diffs? Easy integration with tools like Make, Ant, Gulp, Jake, Rake, MSBuild?

The core editor doesn’t have all the frills of some of the competition – there are no multiple clipboards here, no case changing options, no line sorting – but that’s only because Code is concentrating on the features that really matter. Like the ability to open files or folders; create/ delete/ rename/ move/ use a file’s context menu from within the program; display up to three editor windows side by side for comparisons; search across files; use multiple cursors, expand code snippets and more.

More than a Notepad replacement, not quite a full IDE, Visual Studio Code looks like a spectacular code editor to us, packed with intelligent, time-saving features. Download it immediately.