CodeCity 3D Viewer

Explore any codebase as an interactive 3D code city without leaving VS Code. Classes and modules become buildings, folders become districts, imports become streets, and metrics such as methods (NOM), attributes (NOA) and lines of code (LOC) become height, footprint and colour. CodeCity scans the source directly, so no compilers, build steps, Python, or project dependencies are required.

Features

• Integrated 3D tab — analyze the current workspace and explore its city in a VS Code editor tab.
• External browser option — open the same view in your default browser.
• Activity-bar view — click the CodeCity icon in the Activity Bar to pick a language and open the city for the current project.
• Language selection — English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Persian, with right-to-left support.
• Editor integration — click a building or member to jump straight to its source line in VS Code, Cursor or the system default editor.
• History and comparison — play the project's Git history and compare a selected commit with the current model.
• Exclusions — hide folders, files, classes or patterns and rescan.
• Offline and private — everything runs locally; no source code or metrics ever leave your machine.

Getting started

1. Open a folder or workspace in VS Code.
2. Click the CodeCity icon in the Activity Bar (or press Ctrl+Shift+P and run CodeCity: Open 3D View).
3. In the Activity Bar view, choose a Language and Open in target, then click Open CodeCity.

You can also right-click a folder in the File Explorer and choose CodeCity: Open 3D View, or use the $(globe) CodeCity item in the status bar.

Commands

Both commands are available from the Command Palette and the Explorer/editor context menus.

Settings

Activation events

The extension activates lazily, only when it is needed:

• onCommand:codecity.open — when CodeCity: Open 3D View runs.
• onCommand:codecity.openInBrowser — when CodeCity: Open in External Browser runs.

The Activity Bar view activates the extension when you open it.

Runtime status and how it works

When you open CodeCity, the extension launches a bundled, self-contained Node analysis server:

• It listens on 127.0.0.1 (loopback only) on a random free port, so it is not reachable from other machines.
• It performs a read-only scan of the selected folder and serves the 3D view to the VS Code webview or your browser.
• The server stops automatically when the extension is deactivated or VS Code closes.

No code, file contents, or metrics are uploaded anywhere. See the full guide for the analysis model and its limits.

Supported languages

JavaScript, TypeScript/TSX, Python, Java, C, C++, C#, Go, Rust and Qt (.ui) are parsed with bundled Tree-sitter grammars. Other source files are still shown as buildings with estimated metrics.

Requirements

• VS Code 1.85.0 or newer.
• No other dependencies: the analysis runtime is bundled with the extension.

Troubleshooting

• The tab is blank. Reload the window (Developer: Reload Window) and open CodeCity again. The 3D view needs the local server; if it did not start, an error notification appears.
• "Open in editor" does nothing. Make sure VS Code's code command is on your PATH (run Shell Command: Install 'code' command in PATH), or choose System Default as the editor.
• The port is in use. CodeCity asks the operating system for a free port automatically, so this is normally not an issue.

Uninstall

Remove the extension from the Extensions view, or run:

code --uninstall-extension Amin-Tz.codecity

To uninstall the standalone command-line tool, see the project README.

License

MIT