CodeSandbox May Update

It’s been a couple of weeks since we announced CodeSandbox Projects and we couldn’t be happier about the feedback and input we got from all of you. There are 10K+ signups for our waitlist and we’ve been busy at adding more and more people while addressing all the feedback we got.

First of all, a big thank you from all of us at CodeSandbox. 🙇

Here are a few highlights of what has changed over the last few weeks:

• Layout Changes
  • You can now seamless drag the size of the file explorer or the DevTools area and toggle their visibility with the Command Palette.
• Better Code Highlighting
  • We rolled out various changes and improvements to our custom CodeSandbox Syntax Highlighting Theme and even released a VSCode Extension due to the positive reception.
• Environment Variables
  • Highly requested and ready for you to use. It’s the first iteration of this feature and we’ll add much more to it, but take it slow to make sure security is all tight and in place.
• GitHub Action Support
  • You can now install a GitHub Action for your project to receive automatically created messages with links to the Branch Previews and running code in your PRs where you most need them.
• Binary Files Support
  • We can now show images and other file formats in the editor. We’ll add more special functionality for various file formats in the future.
• PR Review Improvements
  • Whenever you open a PR within CodeSandbox, you can now see what files have changed and see the diffs by clicking on the files in the sidebar.
  • There's a new button in the sidebar (under the git panel). This button installs a GitHub Action that will automatically add links to a live running environment on CodeSandbox for every new PR.
• VSCode Improvements
  • You can now start collaborative terminals, tasks, and previews right from within VSCode!
• QOL Improvements
  • Properly comment out .jsx lines with CMD+ /.
  • Tasks can now be run from the Command Palette and UI alike.
  • Better auto-discovery for newly imported projects to get your project running without extra configuration in many cases.
• Performance improvements
  • Many projects have been ported over from Kubernetes to Firecracker and this brought many performance improvements across the board, from faster loading times to quicker branching.
  • The Dashboard now loads faster as we optimised the initial load and data we poll from the GitHub API, especially for bigger projects.
  • Draft Branches now only get created on CodeSandbox and are only pushed to GitHub when you actually commit changes, reducing the initiation time of new branches.
• Various Bug fixes
  • We are never happy if things don’t work as expected so we squashed a lot of annoying little bugs.
• Beta Invites
  • It’s now easier to self-invite new users to your teams and let them experience CodeSandbox Projects as part of your team.

… and so much more that we can’t even list all stuff here in a readable way. This is also the reason why we kick off weekly Changelogs now. There’s so much happening here every week and we’ll also keep you posted about it on a weekly basis.

Oh … and have you seen we released CodeSandbox for iOS?

Your CodeSandbox team.