Paste a URL to automatically create a Markdown link

[karlhorky]

Initial checklist

• I read the support docs
• I read the contributing guide
• I agree to follow the code of conduct
• I searched issues and couldn’t find anything (or linked relevant results below)

Problem

Pasting a URL overwrites the text

Solution

Pasting a URL in MDX should behave the same way as it does in Markdown in VS Code 1.86 (January 2024):

Want to turn that link you copied into a Markdown link? When you paste a URL into a Markdown file with text selected, VS Code now automatically inserts a Markdown link:

This feature is controlled by the markdown.editor.pasteUrlAsFormattedLink.enabled setting. You can change it to customize this behavior:

• smartWithSelection — The default. This enables the feature when you have selected text and are not inside a special element, such as a code block.
• smart — Same as smartWithSelection but does not require a selection.
• always — Always paste urls as a Markdown links
• never — Disable pasting as Markdown links.

After you've pasted a value, you can always switch to paste the content in a different way by using the Paste control.

Alternatives

A simple implementation:

1. just link the selected text with the URL being pasted from the clipboard
2. boolean flag to disable the feature

[github-actions]

Hi! This was marked as ready to be worked on! Note that while this is ready to be worked on, nothing is said about priority: it may take a while for this to be solved.

Is this something you can and want to work on?

Team: please use the area/* (to describe the scope of the change), platform/* (if this is related to a specific one), and semver/* and type/* labels to annotate this. If this is first-timers friendly, add good first issue and if this could use help, add help wanted.

[remcohaszing]

Yep, great idea!

[remcohaszing]

This uses a proposed API. Specifically, it uses the documentPaste API. If I understand correctly, third party extensions using proposed APIs can’t be published.