💬 Continue Inline Comments

Visual Studio Code extension to automatically continue inline comments.

Overview

Visual Studio Code doesn't support automatic continuation of inline comments out of the box. This extension adds support for it in various languages (see default config).

Inspired by Auto Comment Next Line (GitHub) which wasn't working very well for me.

Configuration

Here's the default config as seen in package.json. Feel free to tweak as you please!

{
  "continueInlineComments.list": {
    "type": "array",
    "default": [
      {
        "comment": "//",
        "languages": [
          "php",
          "javascript",
          "typescript",
          "jsonc",
          "scss",
          "sass",
          "json",
          "vue",
          "markdown",
          "javascriptreact",
          "typescriptreact"
        ]
      },
      {
        "comment": "#",
        "languages": [
          "python",
          "ruby",
          "shellscript",
          "makefile"
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

How it works

See the full code in src/extension.ts.

When a new document is opened or when the language of a document changes (vscode.workspace.onDidOpenTextDocument), we check if the language is supported by our config. If so, we use vscode.languages.setLanguageConfiguration to extend the onEnterRules to add completion for the inline comments (see hacks below).

On load, we also iterate over vscode.window.visibleTextEditors to apply the onEnterRules because otherwise the editors already opened when the extension is loaded would not trigger onDidOpenTextDocument.

Hacks

• Extending onEnterRules is pretty hacky to do. Because vscode.languages.setLanguageConfiguration overwrites the properties we give to it, it means that by setting our custom onEnterRules entry, we're effectively removing all the other onEnterRules defined by the original language definition. Not good.

  To avoid that, we need to get the existing language configuration to add our custom rule on top of the existing ones.

  The problem is that there's no way to get the existing language configuration from the extensions API (see and see), so we have to resort to a dirty hack where we manually identify the language configuration files of the installed extensions, load that file manually with jsonc-parser, and translate the JSON representation of onEnterRules (which is different from the JavaScript representation expected by the extensions API) so that we can use it in vscode.languages.setLanguageConfiguration.

  And while it's annoying AF and a pretty dirty hack in my opinion, it does work pretty fucking well.

• jsonc-parser is not bundled with esbuild because of this issue.

• In package.json, the repository needs to be set to github:valeriangalliat/vscode-continue-inline-comments instead of just valeriangalliat/vscode-continue-inline-comments (which are semantically equivalent) because vsce doesn't support the latter syntax.

• The UNLICENSE file needs to be symlinked as LICENSE for vsce to be happy.

Development

npm install
npm run watch

Publishing

See publishing extensions.

npm install -g vsce
vsce package
vsce publish