Kenning for VS Code

Hover Dictionary for English Learners — the VS Code version of the Kenning Chrome extension.

Hover an English word to see its pronunciation, its meaning in Chinese, its English senses and the exam word lists it is on. It works in code, Markdown and plain text, and it works offline: the dictionary ships inside the extension.

In code, a name is split into the words it is made of, and only the word under the pointer is looked up: on the User of getUserName, Kenning looks up user. An inflected word opens on its base form: running shows run.

Tested on Windows with VS Code 1.90 and 1.145. Not yet tested on macOS or Linux.

Turning it on and off

• Click Kenning in the status bar.
• Or press Shift+Alt+K.
• Or change Kenning: Enabled in Settings.

Showing it only while a key is held

Kenning cannot tell which keys are held down: VS Code does not tell extensions. VS Code itself can hold back every hover until a key is held (VS Code 1.107 or later):

1. Open Settings (Ctrl+,, on a Mac Cmd+,) and search for editor.hover.enabled.
2. Set Editor › Hover: Enabled to onKeyboardModifier.

Hovers then appear only while you hold Ctrl (on a Mac Cmd). This applies to every hover, not only Kenning's: type information and error details wait for the key too. In code, holding Ctrl also underlines the names you can jump to.

To use Alt instead, set Editor: Multi Cursor Modifier to ctrlCmd. The hover key is always the opposite of that setting, so adding a cursor moves to Ctrl+click and Go to Definition moves to Alt+click.

Dictionary

ECDICT and WordNet, licensed separately from the code: see dictionary/ATTRIBUTION.md, which ships inside the extension.