Formatting text in VS Code signature suggestions - visual-studio-code

I'm building an extension for VS Code and I'm wondering how to format text that I provide through SignatureHelp for a signature suggestion. In other extensions I see that you can at least make the text italic or bold and I haven't had any luck looking in repos to figure out how they do it.

I got it working by putting the parameters inside the SignatureInformation label (yes, it's a string and I just appended the human readable parameters at the end of my label).
I needed to provide an array of ParameterInformation containing the parameters I put in the label.
It magically worked after I provided the right activeParameter and activeSignature to the SignatureHelp.

VS code supports Markdown formatting in various places, e.g. hovers (very similar what you can use here or on Github, e.g. ** for bold _ for italic etc.).

Related

Visually changing how a string of characters is represented in VScode

Prettify symbols is an extension in vscode that changes a sequence of characters visually without affecting what the code does. For example, visually changing --> to ⟶ while the coding language uses -->. However, this extension creates seemingly random symbols throughout the file and is no longer maintained. Therefore, that extension is hardly usable at the moment.
Fira Code uses ligatures to do something similar (or the same I am not sure).
What other ways are there to visually change a string of letters ? I am mostly interested in solutions for vscode. As an example I would like to change
~[\Omega]
to
Ω
visually for the user but the code uses the original ~~[\Omega]
[EDIT: I found this github page that adds ligatures to a font. Unfortunately when one creates a ligature where the "hidden" symbol contains many characters and the visible symbol contains a few symbols, a long trace of spaces replacing the missing characters is left behind. The prettify symbols extension mentioned before does not have these spaces. For those that are still interested in making ligatures with the second link, this Fira code font page shows the names of symbols in Fira code. That might be helpful when making a new font from Fira code using the first link of this edit (which is the second link of the question) ]

VSCode custom font ligatures, display two symbols as one?

I would like to display list.emptyqm() as list.empty?() in function names for specific language. So, two symbols qm if they are at the end of the function name should be displayed as ? (possibly some unicode symbol looking similar to question mark).
Is that possible in VSCode?
The VSCode already knows that piece of text is string, or function-name/keyword/variable-name (as it highlights it properly), so the ligature should be displayed only if qm are the last
characters of function-name/keyword/variable-name. It shouldn't be displayed in the middle of the function name, like aqma() shouldn't be displayed as a?a().
You seem to misunderstand what a ligature is. A ligature describes how two individual letters can be combined to form a visual pleasing appearance. A ligature never changes the syntax of a text. Hence, converting qm to ? is a completely different thing.
Replacing text in vscode is of course possible, for instance as part of the format command. You can register your own formatter and determine the text edit actions that you want to be applied, including the transformation of these character sequences.

strikethrough code in markdown on github

I am talking about github markdown here, for files like README.md.
Question:
Is it possible to strikethrough a complete code block in markdown on github?
I know how to mark text as a block of code
this is
multiline code
and
this
this
also
by indenting by 4 spaces or by using ``` or `...
I also know how to strike through texts using
del tag
s tag
~~
Temporary solution:
Independently they work fine, but together not as expected or desired. I tried several combinations of the above mentioned.
For now, I use this:
striked
through
by using ~~ and ` for every single line.
Requirement:
I would like to have a code formatted text striked through, where the code block is continuous:
unfortunately, this is
not striked through
or at least with only a small paragraph in between:
unfortunately, also not
striked through
Is this possible at all?
I found some old posts and hints on using jekyll, but what I was searching for is a simple way, preferably in markdown.
This would only be possible with raw HTML, which GitHub doesn't allow. But you may be able to use a diff instead.
Code blocks are for "pre-formatted" text only. The only formatting you can get in a code block is the formatting that can be represented in plain text (indentation, capitalization, etc). There is no mechanism to mark up the content of a code block (as bold, italic, stricken, underlined, etc). This was an intentional design decision. Otherwise, how would you be able to show Markdown text in a code block? If you want formatted text, then you need to use something other than a code block.
As the rules state:
HTML is a publishing format; Markdown is a writing format. Thus, Markdown’s formatting syntax only addresses issues that can be conveyed in plain text.
For any markup that is not covered by Markdown’s syntax, you simply use HTML itself.
Therefore you would need to format your own custom HTML code block with the various bits marked up properly:
<pre><code><del>some stricken code</del>
<del>A second line of stricken code</del>
</code></pre>
However, for security reasons, GitHub will strip out any such raw HTML in your Markdown. So while this works where you have full control of the entire stack, on a hosted service it is most likely not possible.
However, I'm assuming you want to show some changes made to a block of code. As it turns out, a specific format already exists for that, namely, a diff. Just use a fenced code block with diff as the language and GitHub will format it correctly:
```diff
Unchanged Line
- Removed Line
+ Added Line
```
You can see how GitHub displays the above code block live (you can also see that in raw), but I've included a screenshot below for convenience.
I realize that the formatting does not use strike-through, but it does use a commonly used and understood format. For more complex blocks, you should probably use the diff utility program to generate the diff for you.
Expanding on Waylan's answer:
This may be obvious to others, but it caught me. When you have indented lines, be sure + or - is the first character on the line or it won't highlight.
```diff
<div>
Unchanged Line
<ul>
- <li>This won't work</li>
- <li>This will</li>
+ <li>1st character, then indent</li>
</ul>
</div>
```
After much much trying, I finally got it to work! It boils down to this:
inside ``` block, nothing is rendered (other than syntax highlights for language specified)
inside <code> block, markdown won't render, only HTML. You can use <strike>. It's fine, but you don't get the syntax coloring
now for the magic: use HTML for striking, and markdown for coloring:
<strike>
```language
this is
multiline code
```
</strike>
P.S. ``` blocks should always be surrounded by blank lines to work
On the subject of marking up the content of a code block, to tack an italicized string on to the end of a line of "code", try something like:
<code>id\_pn\_aside\_subscriber\_form\__form\_id_</code>
(You can see this in action at: https://github.com/devonostendorf/post-notif#how-do-you-use-the-stylesheet_filename-attribute-with-the-shortcode)
I had a hard time finding an example that matched this precise use case, so I hope this proves useful for anyone else trying to accomplish a similar effect.

Copy formatted text to clipboard

A simple html page has FORMATTED text - not fancy - line breaks, and italic.
I want to have a button that takes this formatted text, and copies it to the clipboard, formatted (it is planned to be pasted into some LibreOffice document later).
Couldn't find how to do it.
I tried ZeroClipboard, and a suggestion to parse the text, replacing ""-s to "\r\n". That indeed does the trick for line breaks, but what about italic?... Any means to get this functionality?...
When you create an italic tag the responsible for formatting the document and showing the text properly is the browser. If you want to copy the text you should get the text already parse and render by the browser or parse yourself the text like you did with break lines. For italics when you find a ... tag you must create the adequate text. That is, text in italics, but that depends on the language you are using, but i'm sure it can be done.
OK,
Turns out that ZeroClipboard had this functionality (of rendering the HTML text upon paste), but have disabled it.
However, the version that supports it can be found at: https://github.com/botcheddevil/ZeroClipboard
Note:
You may find that in this version, creating the client, binding the flash to a component, and handling the events are rather different than the documentation of current version of ZeroClipboard (https://github.com/zeroclipboard/zeroclipboard/blob/master/docs/instructions.md

Superscript in markdown (Github flavored)?

Following this lead, I tried this in a Github README.md:
<span style="vertical-align: baseline; position: relative;top: -0.5em;>text in superscript</span>
Does not work, the text appears as normal. Help?
Use the <sup></sup>tag (<sub></sub> is the equivalent for subscripts). See this gist for an example.
You have a few options for this. The answer depends on exactly what you're trying to do, how readable you want the content to be when viewed as Markdown and where your content will be rendered:
HTML Tags
As others have said, <sup> and <sub> tags work well for arbitrary text. Embedding HTML in a Markdown document like this is well supported so this approach should work with most tools that render Markdown.
Personally, I find HTML impairs the readable of Markdown somewhat, when working with it "bare" (eg. in a text editor) but small tags like this aren't too bad.
LaTeX (New!)
As of May 2022, GitHub supports embedding LaTeX expressions in Markdown docs directly. This gives us new way to render arbitrary text as superscript or subscript in GitHub flavoured Markdown, and it works quite well.
LaTeX expressions are delineated by $$ for blocks or $ for inline expressions. In LaTeX you indicate superscript with the ^ and subscript with _. Curly braces ({ and }) can be used to group characters. You also need to escape spaces with a backslash. The GitHub implementation uses MathJax so see their docs for what else is possible.
You can use super or subscript for mathematical expressions that require it, eg:
$$e^{-\frac{t}{RC}}$$
Which renders as..
Or render arbitrary text as super or subscript inline, eg:
And so it was indeed: she was now only $_{ten\ inches\ high}$, and her face brightened up at the thought that she was now the right size for going through the little door into that lovely garden.
Which renders as..
I've put a few other examples here in a Gist.
Unicode
If the superscript (or subscript) you need is of a mathematical nature, Unicode may well have you covered.
I've compiled a list of all the Unicode super and subscript characters I could identify in this gist. Some of the more common/useful ones are:
⁰ SUPERSCRIPT ZERO (U+2070)
¹ SUPERSCRIPT ONE (U+00B9)
² SUPERSCRIPT TWO (U+00B2)
³ SUPERSCRIPT THREE (U+00B3)
ⁿ SUPERSCRIPT LATIN SMALL LETTER N (U+207F)
People also often reach for <sup> and <sub> tags in an attempt to render specific symbols like these:
™ TRADE MARK SIGN (U+2122)
® REGISTERED SIGN (U+00AE)
℠ SERVICE MARK (U+2120)
Assuming your editor supports Unicode, you can copy and paste the characters above directly into your document or find them in your systems emoji and symbols picker.
On MacOS, simultaneously press the Command ⌘ + Control + Space keys to open the emoji picker. You can browse or search, or click the small icon in the top right to open the more advanced Character Viewer.
On Windows, you can a emoji and symbol picker by pressing ⊞ Windows + ..
Alternatively, if you're putting these characters in an HTML document, you could use the hex values above in an HTML character escape. Eg, ² instead of ². This works with GitHub (and should work anywhere else your Markdown is rendered to HTML) but is less readable when presented as raw text.
Images
If your requirements are especially unusual, you can always just inline an image. The GitHub supported syntax is:
![Alt text goes here, if you'd like](path/to/image.png)
You can use a full path (eg. starting with https:// or http://) but it's often easier to use a relative path, which will load the image from the repo, relative to the Markdown document.
If you happen to know LaTeX (or want to learn it) you could do just about any text manipulation imaginable and render it to an image. Sites like Quicklatex make this quite easy. Of course, if you know your document will be rendered on GitHub, you can use the new (2022) embedded LaTeX syntax discussed earlier)
Comments about previous answers
The universal solution is using the HTML tag <sup>, as suggested in the main answer.
However, the idea behind Markdown is precisely to avoid the use of such tags:
The document should look nice as plain text, not only when rendered.
Another answer proposes using Unicode characters, which makes the document look nice as a plain text document but could reduce compatibility.
Finally, I would like to remember the simplest solution for some documents: the character ^.
Some Markdown implementation (e.g. MacDown in macOS) interprets the caret as an instruction for superscript.
Ex.
Sin^2 + Cos^2 = 1
Clearly, Stack Overflow does not interpret the caret as a superscript instruction. However, the text is comprehensible, and this is what really matters when using Markdown.
If you only need superscript numbers, you can use pure Unicode. It provides all numbers plus several additional characters as superscripts:
x⁰¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹⁺⁻⁼⁽⁾ⁿⁱ
However, it might be that the chosen font does not support them, so be sure to check the rendered output.
In fact, there are even quite a few superscript letters, however, their intended use might not be for superscript, and font support might be even worse. Use your own judgement.