VisGist

Intro

VisGist allows you to view, create and edit Gists from within Visual Studio. It also includes customizable syntax highlighting to make working with gists easier.

Getting Started

Get a Public Access Token via Github > Settings > Developer Settings > Personal Access Tokens > Fine-grained Tokens. Ensure you set Account Permissions > Gists under the token to "Read and Write"

In Visual Studio > Tools > Options > VisGist > Github Settings > Personal Access Token enter your Personal Access Token.

Operational

Authentication

Your Git Personal Access Token (PAT) is stored using encryption based on your local machine's hardware. Thus, you may need to re-generate and re-enter your PAT if you're having problems following any hardware changes.

Syntax Highlighting

VisGist uses AvalonEdit for syntax highlighting. It gets the syntax definitions from files stored in:

%appdata%\VisGist\Highlighting

There are Light and Dark versions for each syntax definition. If your language is not there, you can always create a new syntax file from the existing files or by reading the AvalonEdit docs.

VisGit has a language auto-select function. It achieves this via checking the extension of the GistFile and matches it against those in the syntax files. If you have corresponding syntax files for a language for both Light and Dark, you must ensure that all file extensions you want recognized are in the Light version. Best practice is to ensure these match across the two.

💡Why not share any languages you create?? Send me the code or fork and pull request💡

Gist File Headings

The 'Title Gist' (the Gist's name) is just the first GistFile in the collection ascii-betically. Thus, there's facility in VisGist to set a GistFile as the Title Gist by right clicking the file in the treeview. You can also set what character to use to make a GistFile the Title Gist in the options menu. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a way to use invisible characters, so it looks like it does have to be an actual visible character. I use a period/dot as it's the least visible.

Thanks + Acknowledgments