easy-extensibility

Extend VSCode without the ceremony of making a full extension! Just write your code anywhere and it'll be part of VSCode!

• Introductory Youtube Video
• See many more GIFS/articles here!

💐 VSCode is itself a JavaScript REPL 🔁:

Features

• New keybinding: cmd+E to evaluate a selection of JavaScript, or the entirety of the current line.
  • Use shift+cmd+E to insert the result onto the next line.
• New keybinding: cmd+H to provide a command pallet for user-defined commands using this extension.
• The easy-extensibility Extension API, or “E API”, which acts as a high-level user-friendly alterative to the default vscode Extension API.

Accessibility

• 🚴 Open the tutorial to learn more about using cmd+E by invoking cmd+h tutorial
• 📚 To learn about “saving reusable functions and having them load automatically”, please invoke cmd+h find users init.js file, or provide a template

Extensive Docs

The E API is well-documented; for example the E.readInput method's docs even suggest an example user extension. 🚀

Anaphoric Usage (with code completion & docstrings)

The current implementation treats VSCode as if it were dynamically-scoped: Any open editor may mention E, commands, vscode with no ceremonial import of any kind!

• This is similar to the use of the keyword this in object-oriented programming: It's an implicitly introduced argument!

However, for discovarability and example uses, it would be nice to have code completetion: Just write E. and wait a second to see possible completions ---or write the name of the method you want to use and if it's part of the E API, you'll also get completion as shown below.

A growing user-friendly API!

Why this (meta)extension?

There is essentially only one step (⭐) to making an extension. 🤗 Sharing an extension, such as a tiny 5-line command, should be as easy as having that defintion code readily available.

In constrast, the default approach to making a VSCode extension is as follows:

1. 😱 Make a new NodeJS project, say with yo code as per https://code.visualstudio.com/api/get-started/your-first-extension
2. ⭐ Actually write your extension's code
3. 😱 Run your code in a dedicated sandbox with F5, far from your code
4. 😱 Try your extension; stop the sandbox; alter your code; repeat.
5. Now to actually make use of your extension, you should pacakge it with vsce package
   • To share it with others, you'll need to:
     1. 😱 Make a Microsoft account
     2. 😱 Make a new Azure organisation, as in https://dev.azure.com/alhassy
     3. 😱 Create a Personal Access Token for use in the extension marketplace; as per https://code.visualstudio.com/api/working-with-extensions/publishing-extension

This approach doesn't encourage making extensions ---since there's so much ceremony--- and it, likewise, doesn't encourage sharing/packaging up the resulting (tiny) extensions.

🔥 Invoke cmd+h tutorial to see the tutorial, which concludes with a comparison of our init.js-style extensions versuses thats of the default VSCode style.