We’re excited to announce the March 2025 release of the Python, Pylance and Jupyter extensions for Visual Studio Code!

This release includes the following announcements:

• Improvements to Python shell integration
• New setting for auto test discovery file pattern
• Inline values on hover in Notebooks and Python files
• Automatic quotation insertion when breaking long strings

If you’re interested, you can check the full list of improvements in our changelogs for the Python, Jupyter and Pylance extensions.

Improvements to Python shell integration

After modifying the python.terminal.shellIntegration.enabled setting, you will no longer have to reload in order for changes to take effect. Previously changes to this setting required a reload of the VS Code window in order for changes to take effect in the terminal. Now, simply create a new terminal to see desired changes on your Python REPL in terminal!

New setting for auto test discovery file pattern

You can now refine which files auto test discovery occurs on by specifying a glob pattern in the python.testing.autoTestDiscoverOnSavePattern setting. By default, its value is set to **/*.py, but can now be adjusted based on your specific project needs.

This feature was added by community member @soceanainn. Thank you for the feedback and feature add!

Inline values on hover in Notebooks and Python files

Notebook inline values, enabled via the notebook.inlineValues setting, are now truncated to fit within the viewport’s width. Instead, a rich hover provides the full value with preserved whitespace formatting, ensuring variable structures, such as dataframes, remain intact for easier readability at a glance.

Similarly, when debug.inlineValues is enabled, inline value decorators are shown in Python and will now have an inline hover, making it easier to read values at a glance.

Automatic quotation insertion when breaking long strings

Pylance now supports automatic insertion of quotation marks to enable a seamless experience when breaking long strings. This was a highly requested feature by our users and we are looking forward to bringing this functinoality to the Python development experience in VS Code.

Other Changes and Enhancements

We have also added small enhancements and fixed issues requested by users that should improve your experience working with Python and Jupyter Notebooks in Visual Studio Code. Some notable changes include:

• Windows users who use Gitbash will now see the correct working directory in their terminal prompt. These changes apply to those opted into the pythonTerminalEnvVarActivation experiment.
• We now look for test debug configurations in both settings.json and launch.json files, expanding where you can define these configurations.
• Some optimizations were made to improve Pylance’s memory consumption, particularly when working with large workspaces. This enhancement was made to Pyright, the static type checker that powers Pylance’s language server features.

We would also like to extend special thanks to this month’s contributors:

• @jpcorreia99 Changes to always use environment path when running conda environment commands in vscode-python#24807
• @TCPsoftware Make "args": "${command:pickArgs}" as default debug configuration #548 in vscode-python-debugger#548
  • @ivirabyan Added dmypy file status setting in vscode-mypy#347

Try out these new improvements by downloading the Python extension and the Jupyter extension from the Marketplace, or install them directly from the extensions view in Visual Studio Code (Ctrl + Shift + X or ⌘ + ⇧ + X). You can learn more about Python support in Visual Studio Code in the documentation. If you run into any problems or have suggestions, please file an issue on the Python VS Code GitHub page.