How to Add a VS Code Editor to Your Website

The Monaco editor by Microsoft provides a code editor component that can be easily integrated into websites. With just a few lines of code, you can add a full-featured editor similar to VS Code in your web app. In this tutorial, we'll see how to do just that.

Getting Started

To use Monaco, we need to include it in our page. We can get it from a CDN:

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/monaco-editor/0.23.0/min/vs/loader.min.js"></script>

This will load the Monaco library asynchronously. Next, we need a <div> in our HTML where we can instantiate the editor:

<div id="editor"></div>

Now in our JavaScript code, we can initialize Monaco and create the editor:

require.config({ paths: { 'vs': 'https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/monaco-editor/0.23.0/min/vs' }});

require(["vs/editor/editor.main"], function() {
  const editor = monaco.editor.create(document.getElementById('editor'), {
    value: ['<!DOCTYPE html>',
             '<html>',
             '  <body>',
             '    <h1>Hello World!</h1>', 
             '  </body>',
             '</html>'].join('\n'),
    language: 'html'
  });
});

This will create the editor with some sample HTML content.

Adding Theme

To make it look like VS Code, we need to add the theme CSS:

<link href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/monaco-editor/0.23.0/min/vs/editor/editor.main.css" rel="stylesheet" />

The editor.main.css provides the core editor styles. For the VS Code dark theme, include:

const editor = monaco.editor.create(..., {
  theme: 'vs-dark' 
});

That's it! We now have a VS Code-like editor on our page.

Configuring Languages

To add language support, pass the language parameter when creating the editor:

const editor = monaco.editor.create(..., {
  language: 'javascript'
});

Monaco comes with intelligent code completion, syntax highlighting, and validation for popular languages like HTML, CSS, JavaScript and more.

Conclusion

With just a few lines of code, Monaco makes it easy to integrate a code editor into your web app. Customizable themes and language support takes it to the next level providing a full-featured coding environment for your users.

Let me know if you would like me to expand or modify anything in this article!