The current editor I have open contains the name of a file or part of the name of a file that I have in my workspace. I want to search for that file by selecting the text of that name from the editor, and then putting that text in the Quick Open search box. Currently, I need to manually copy and paste the text, but I want to have behaviour similar to the cmd + F search box where the selected text from the editor immediately appears in the search bar when it is opened. Is it possible to configure Quick Open to do this as well? Or maybe there is an extension for this?
At the time of this writing, this is currently not configurable.
If you look in the settings, all the settings that allow enabling or disabling this behaviour contain the word "seed" in them: search.seedOnFocus, search.seedWithNearestWord, editor.find.seedSearchStringFromSelection. From my reading/searching, there is no other setting with the word "seed" in it.
I googled "github vscode issues quickopen seed" and found this GitHub feature-request on the VS Code GitHub repo: Fuzzy quick open should use selected text as a starting point #59957 asking for such behaviour to be the default behaviour. The issue didn't get enough support from other users to get added to their backlog (a feature request needs to get a certain number of thumbs up reactions from users within a certain time period after it is created to get considered for implementation), so that feature-request is now closed.
If you want to get such a configuration option, create a feature-request issue ticket. If you want to increase your feature-request's visibility (and therefore its chance of getting enough user support), share a link to it on various programming platforms such as r/vscode.
I didn't find any extensions that do this by googling "vscode marketplace quick open seed" and looking at the top results, but maybe you'll have better luck with different queries.
I always use footnote style links in markdown because it makes the plain text more readable for me. E.g.:
This is [Stack Overflow][1].
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com
in most Markdown renderers will display as:
This is Stack Overflow.
I could have sworn I've been doing this all along in vscode. However, recently I notice that it in vscode renders as:
This is [Stack Overflow][1].
It knows there's something special about the footnote style link because it doesn't render the footnote at all. But the anchor text is not rendered as a link. This seems like a severe regression to me, but I can't find any bugs reported for it.
My specific questions that I am seeking definitive answers on:
Can anyone confirm that this either did or did not work in the past?
Has this been intentionally disabled?
Is this part of the new workspace security settings?
Thanks to those who commented that it works for them. Knowing that it works for other people really helped narrow down my search for what was wrong.
Turns out the Foam extension was causing this. After disabling it footnote links render properly now.
If I copy the above text from Chrome and paste it into Obsidian, I get
People who code: we want your input. [Take the Survey](https://stackoverflow.com/dev-survey/start?utm_source=so-owned&utm_medium=announcement-banner&utm_campaign=dev-survey-2021)
[](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask# "dismiss")
But when I paste into VS Code or any other editor, I get
People who code: we want your input. Take the Survey
Video Reference: https://dsc.cloud/J/67968285.mov
How does Obsidian do it? How can I achieve the same in VS Code?
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
The Short Answer:
" The VSCode editor does not support the feature you described, and VSCode will almost certainly never support any functionality that comes close to it. This is because of what VSCode is, and what VSCode does, which I will explain in detail below."
The Long Answer:
So VS-Code is a text-based editor, and its purpose is to be an environment that programmers can write their code in, therefore, people using VSCode are going to preform a long list of tasks which includes, but is not limited to:
interpret, compile, execute, debug, serve, share, save, write, read, document, and run code. Now here is the problem with adding the ability to paste arbitrary data types into VSCode. Having any type of data, other than standard text in a file that you plan on using to do one of the following (this is the very short list)...
compile,
execute,
debug,
interpret
parse,
serve,
...will cause a syntax error to be thrown.
When you can copy, and paste, text-formatting from an external source (like a webpage), there is an extremely high probability that some unwanted formatting data will get pasted into some program you've written, and the text's format-data will end up not rendering for what ever reason (theirs a million and 87 reasons why that would happen), and you end up getting syntax errors that you can't see, so you now have no idea where the error is, despite the error message saying line number 734 column 24. In a situation like this you will have an error message that makes no sense, and you will have to start deleting things to find the issue. all because it has text-formatting data intertwined with standard text-data, which you can't see. I hope I drew a clear enough picture for you.
Their are other tools called word processors that implement this feature. I constantly couple G-Docs with VSCode.
Crazy Enough, not all is lost
VSCode allows extensions to make custom editors. The Extension API used to create an editor (can be seen by clicking the link) lets developers build the UI using standard HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This is enough for someone to write a Word Processor for VSCode, which surprisingly no one has done yet. When someone does create one, which I am almost certain that someone will eventually, in could support the feature your asking for.
For the record, the feature your describing is typically a word processor thing. VSCode allows you to install extensions such as PASTE, which copies and pastes other data types, however; when it is pasted into the editor, instead of rendering the data types like HTML, it just writes it in its text format. In other words, you might think your copying the page at first, but you will be disappointed once you paste to VSCode. I want to point out that Paste uses the GTK-3 Clipboards API, which means that if Paste were to be implemented in a word-processor, like word, or Google docs, those word processors would render the data the the Paste extension pasted into the word processor. In other words, it isn't the extension that is failing to render the Data (which as stated, can be done with the Paste Extension), but its VSCode that wonder render that data as HTML, but only accepts it as a standard text data type.
#W3Dojo
What you've copied can be considered "rich text", but VSCode treats everything in your clipboard as plain text.
So it's the same as pasting via "Ctrl+Shift+V" in other programs like Word or Google Docs. It will remove any formatting, links, color, font, bold/italic, etc.
Obsidian was built with formatting in mind - it closely follows the markdown specification, so it's natural that it will try to convert any rich text to markdown.
I'm not aware of a built-in VSCode setting that will allow you to paste rich text, but I've found 2 extensions that might do the trick:
Paste Special
Markdown Paste
github automaticall syntax highlights any code files such as those with .c extensions. And there seems plenty of information about controlling highlighting from within 'markdown' or .md files.
But how can I get it to highlight code files that it doesn't know about?
I can't even get the tabbing right - if I say 4-spaces tabs while editing, it goes back to 8-space ones when I've finished.
I don't care what highlighting style it uses even if it's the wrong language; it must be better than the plain text appearance which looks really flat. Oddly, when editing it uses some sort of highlighting, which again disappears when I've finished.
The files aren't in any well-known language so the highlighting won't be perfect; I just want a bit of colour. But I'd rather not change file extensions as that could be confusing.
The tabbing is done through a ?t=4 parameter added to the GitHub url.
But the syntax highlighting (using Rouge on GitHub pages for instance) itself is either:
set in fenced code block (but only for .md markdown pages)
or by changing the file extension (which you don't want)
But how can I get it to highlight code files that it doesn't know about?
Update Feb. 2021 (5 years later)
Nat Friedman (CEO of GitHub) announces it on Twitter:
Another tiny but nice improvement we just shipped to GitHub – syntax highlighting now works on new files without the need to commit first.
There are two competing requirements
1) I want to pretty print so that I can read and understand code written by my peers
2) I don't want to check in the pretty printed code to source control because...
It might not meet the coding standard where I work
When reviewing history in source control, formatting changes obscure the 'real' changes.
For discussion of problems checking in formatting changes, see this other stackoverflow question
Committing when changing source formatting?
At the same time, I still need to be able to edit the file and save changes. I want to be able to edit the ugly text while I see the pretty text.
Does anyone know an editor with a feature like this?