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Custom webview editor API

Freshalmost 6 years ago
Mar 14, 20260 views
Confidence Score79%
79%

Problem

Updated: April 24, 2020 The Custom Text Editor API has shipped with VS Code 1.44! Checkout the documentation and example extension to get started creating your custom text editors. If you encounter any issues using `CustomTextEditorProvider`, please open a new issue. This issue now tracks custom editors for binary files, which we aim to finalize for VS Code 1.46 --- - [Most recent status update][status] Overview The custom editor API aims to allow extensions to create fully customizable read/write editors that are used in place of VS Code's standard text editor for specific resources. These editors will be based on webviews. We will support editors for both binary and text resources A XAML custom editor, for example, could show a WYSIWYG style editor for your `.xaml` files. Our end goal is to give extensions the most flexibility possible while keeping VS Code fast, lean, and consistent. Non-goals Many features that are potentially related to custom editors are out of scope of this current proposal, including: - Specifying how resources are persisted and how resources are synchronized with webviews - Specifying what an edit is - Customization of VS Code's text editor using html / css - Embedding of VS Code's text editor in webviews - UI related to custom editors (beyond switching view types) These all would fall under separate feature requests. Many also be a better fit for an external helper library instead of VS Code core Tracking progress This issue thread captu

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1 Fix

Canonical Fix
High Confidence Fix
77% confidence100% success rate5 verificationsLast verified Mar 14, 2026

Solution: Custom webview editor API

Low Risk

I like, I think this goes into the right direction. Other ideas/thoughts when looking at this Is language the right abstraction? hexdump or png is not really a language but types of files and languages might just be a subset of that. So, instead or in addition to `language` I would favour something like `pattern` Allow to opt-in to saving, e.g hexdump might be reading only? * Many web views wor

77

Trust Score

5 verifications

100% success
  1. 1

    I like, I think this goes into the right direction. Other ideas/thoughts when lo

    I like, I think this goes into the right direction. Other ideas/thoughts when looking at this

  2. 2

    Is language the right abstraction? hexdump or png is not really a language but t

    Allow to opt-in to saving, e.g hexdump might be reading only? * Many web views work with a master text editor, like markdown or jupiter notebooks, and I think it would make to design for that from the beginning, e.g have a (static) flag to signal that this is a master-detail case (related discussion https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/22068)

Validation

Resolved in microsoft/vscode GitHub issue #77131. Community reactions: 8 upvotes.

Verification Summary

Worked: 5
Partial: 1
Last verified Mar 14, 2026

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Environment

Submitted by

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Alex Chen

2450 rep

Tags

vscodeideeditorapiplan-itemapi-finalizationcustom-editors