Custom editors allow extensions to create fully customizable read/write editors that are used in place of VS Code's standard text editor for specific types of resources. They have a wide variety of use cases, such as: Previewing assets, such as shaders or 3D models, directly in VS Code.

Apr 3, 2025 · Use the Custom Editor API to create customizable editors within Visual Studio Code. Custom editors allow extensions to create fully customizable read/write editors that are used in place of VS Code's standard text editor for specific types of resources. They have a wide variety of use cases, such as:

Provider for editable custom editors that use a custom document model. Custom editors use CustomDocument as their document model instead of a TextDocument. This gives extensions full control over actions such as edit, save, and backup. You should use this type of custom editor when dealing with binary files or more complex scenarios.

Provider for readonly custom editors that use a custom document model. Custom editors use CustomDocument as their document model instead of a TextDocument. You should use this type of custom editor when dealing with binary files or more complex scenarios. For simple text based documents, use CustomTextEditorProvider instead.

Oct 13, 2020 · I have an extensions that registers a CustomEditorProvider for a specific file type and I need to create a command that opens a given file with my editor. If i click on the file from the workspace explorer my editor opens correctly but if I use the showTextDocument api the built-in text editor will open.

VS Code API. VS Code API is a set of JavaScript APIs that you can invoke in your Visual Studio Code extension. This page lists all VS Code APIs available to extension authors. API namespaces and classes. This listing is compiled from the vscode.d.ts file from the VS Code repository. authentication

Paw Draw - Uses the binary custom editor api to provide a custom editor for .pawdraw files (which are just png files with a different file extension). Open the example files from the exampleFiles directory.

From the UI to the editing experience, almost every part of VS Code can be customized and enhanced through the Extension API. In fact, many core features of VS Code are built as extensions and use the same Extension API. This documentation describes: Code samples are available at Microsoft/vscode-extension-samples.

Provider for text based custom editors. Text based custom editors use a TextDocument as their data model. This considerably simplifies implementing a custom editor as it allows the editor to handle many common operations such as undo and backup.

Apr 23, 2020 · Custom editors let extensions provide custom editing experiences using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in place of VS Code’s normal text based editor. Custom editors support both text based files and binary files, and enable some neat new scenarios such as wysiwyg editors, previews, and even image editors!