Remote VNC

View and control a remote screen over VNC directly inside Visual Studio Code.

Remote VNC embeds the battle-tested noVNC client in a VS Code editor panel and bridges it to any standard VNC/RFB server — no external websockify proxy required. Connect to a headless server, a container, a dev board, or a desktop without leaving your editor.

Install

Search for Remote VNC in the Extensions view, or:

code --install-extension OlehPlotnikov.remote-vnc

For VSCodium, Cursor, Windsurf and other editors that do not use Microsoft's Marketplace, the same extension is on Open VSX. A .vsix is attached to every release if you would rather install it by hand.

Features

• 🖥️ Full VNC viewer in an editor tab — keyboard, mouse and live framebuffer.
• 🔌 No proxy needed — the extension runs a private, loopback-only TCP ↔ WebSocket bridge with a single-use token, so the browser-based client can reach a raw RFB server.
• 💾 Saved connections stored in settings, with passwords kept in VS Code's encrypted Secret Storage.
• 🎚️ Tunable quality / compression, view-only mode, viewport scaling and optional server-side resize.
• 🧩 Multiple sessions — open several remote screens side by side.

Usage

Open the Command Palette (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+P) and run one of:

Address formats

• 192.168.1.10 → port 5900
• server:5901 → explicit TCP port
• server:1 → VNC display 1 → port 5901 (values below 100 are display numbers)
• [::1]:5901 → bracketed IPv6 literal

Settings

How it works

┌──────────────┐   postMessage   ┌─────────────────────┐   WebSocket    ┌──────────────┐   TCP/RFB   ┌────────────┐
│  Webview      │ ◀────────────▶ │  Extension host      │ ◀───────────▶ │  Loopback     │ ◀────────▶ │ VNC server │
│  (noVNC RFB)  │                 │  (commands, bridge)  │  127.0.0.1     │  WS↔TCP bridge │            │            │
└──────────────┘                 └─────────────────────┘                └──────────────┘             └────────────┘

Browsers — and therefore VS Code webviews — cannot open raw TCP sockets, while VNC servers speak the RFB protocol over plain TCP. The extension host opens an ephemeral WebSocket server bound to 127.0.0.1, guarded by a random per-session token, and pipes bytes verbatim to a fresh TCP connection to the VNC server.

Security note: VNC traffic itself is not encrypted by classic RFB. For connections across untrusted networks, tunnel through SSH (ssh -L 5901:localhost:5900 host) and point Remote VNC at the local end of the tunnel.

Running on a remote (Dev Container, Remote-SSH, WSL, Codespaces)

When VS Code is attached to a remote, the extension host and the bridge run on the remote, but the webview renders on your local machine. The bridge's 127.0.0.1 therefore means the remote, which the webview cannot reach directly. The extension resolves the bridge URL through asExternalUri, which forwards the port out to your machine.

For Remote-SSH, WSL and Codespaces this is automatic. For a local Dev Container, asExternalUri does not auto-forward an ephemeral port — so set a fixed bridge port and forward it once:

// .devcontainer/devcontainer.json
{
  "forwardPorts": [5959],
  "customizations": {
    "vscode": { "settings": { "remoteVnc.bridgePort": 5959 } }
  }
}

Then Dev Containers: Rebuild and Reopen in Container (or just forward port 5959 from the Ports panel without rebuilding). A fixed bridge port allows one session at a time. Connection diagnostics are written to the Remote VNC output channel (View → Output → Remote VNC).

Development

npm install
npm run build      # bundle extension host + webview once
npm run watch      # rebuild on change

Press F5 in VS Code to launch an Extension Development Host.

To produce a .vsix:

npm run build
npx @vscode/vsce package --no-dependencies

License

MIT.

The bundles also contain noVNC (MPL-2.0) and ws (MIT), which stay under their own terms. Attribution and source-availability details are in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.