# Introducing Swift for Visual Studio Code

**URL:** <https://forums.swift.org/t/introducing-swift-for-visual-studio-code/54246>\
**Category:** Development\
**Created:** [December 24, 2021, 1:44am UTC](https://forums.swift.org/t/introducing-swift-for-visual-studio-code/54246 "2021-12-24T01:44:00Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 83

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**Author:** ![taylorswift](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/swift/user_avatar/forums.swift.org/taylorswift/32/43413_2.png) [@taylorswift](https://forums.swift.org/u/taylorswift)\
**Post date:** [July 18, 2022, 2:35pm UTC](https://forums.swift.org/t/introducing-swift-for-visual-studio-code/54246/83 "2022-07-18T14:35:27Z")

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> [@adam-fowler](#):
>
> What version of vscode are you running? The highlighting is done VS Code. This is the code in here [vscode/swift.tmLanguage.json at main · microsoft/vscode · GitHub](https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/extensions/swift/syntaxes/swift.tmLanguage.json)

the highlighting is not done by VSCode, it is done by sourcekitd. this is the issue i was [alluding to](https://forums.swift.org/t/introducing-swift-for-visual-studio-code/54246/63) earlier in this thread.

the reason you are seeing a colored `await` is likely because you have the syntax highlighting _turned off_, in your `settings.json`, or whatever VSCode theme you are using. because the highlighter is disabled, the editor attempts to apply the heuristics in `swift.tmLanguage.json` instead, which knows how to highlight `await` but is less accurate elsewhere.

i've observed a similar problem with `#if`, `#else` and friends, but because the VSCode swift extension doesn’t attempt to label them (whereas it labels `await` as an identifier), it is possible to provide a fallback for those in a way that is not possible for `await` and `async`, and probably `override` and the other contextual keywords as well.

(note: i don’t know why the preprocessor macros don’t get highlights, these labels exist in sourcekitd, and Atomic Blonde was always able to access them, so my guess is the VSCode extension is just discarding them.)

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