Smoower.Minified — Readable View

Read and edit ultra-compact ·minified C# as if it were written normally.

Smoower.Minified is a set of .NET libraries and AI-generation rules that make your ASP.NET Core / EF Core code deliberately tiny — short aliases, fused helpers, and at the highest level even whitespace stripped out — so AI assistants spend far fewer tokens reading and writing it (lower cost, faster generation). Great for the machine. Hard on human eyes:

[HG]public Tr All()=>db.Products.nt().w(x=>x.Price>0).ob(x=>x.Name).s(x=>new ProductOut(x.Id,x.Name,x.Price)).okl();

This extension gives you a readable view of that same code, on demand:

[HttpGet]
public Tr All() =>
    db.Products
      .AsNoTracking()
      .Where(x => x.Price > 0)
      .OrderBy(x => x.Name)
      .Select(x => new ProductOut(x.Id, x.Name, x.Price))
      .okl();

Your file on disk stays compact — the readable version is a live projection. Edit the readable view and save, and your changes are written back in the compact style automatically. You get readability when you want it without giving up the token savings.

What it does

• Expands the shorthand. Compact method and attribute aliases become their familiar long forms (.w → .Where, .s → .Select, nt → AsNoTracking, [HG] → [HttpGet], CT → CancellationToken).
• Un-packs the whitespace. Even at the most aggressive compaction level — where a whole class is squeezed onto one line — the readable view re-formats it into normal, indented C#.
• Edits round-trip. The readable view is fully editable. On save, it's re-compacted and written back to the real file, so your repository stays in the token-cheap form.
• Explains tokens in place. Hover any compact token right in your normal editor to see what it means — no need to open the readable view at all.

How to use it

1. Open any C# file written in the Smoower.Minified style.
2. Hover a compact token (e.g. .w, [HG], nt) to see its meaning inline.
3. For the full picture, run a command from the Command Palette (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+P):
   • Minified: Open Readable View (beside) — opens the expanded, editable version next to your file. Edit it and Ctrl/Cmd+S to save back compact.
   • Minified: Open Readable View (diff vs compact) — shows the compact and readable versions side by side as a diff.

The same commands are available from the editor title bar on C# files.

Requirements

None. The extension is self-contained — there's nothing else to install, and you don't need the .NET SDK on your machine.

About Smoower.Minified

This extension is the readability companion to the Smoower.Minified family. If you haven't seen it yet, start at the reference implementation:

➡️ github.com/Smoower/dotnet-minified

That repo explains the compaction levels (L1 readable aliases → L3 whitespace-packed), the libraries, and the AI-generation prompt that produces the compact code in the first place.

Current status

This is an early release. Today it reflows whitespace and expands the common one-to-one aliases (methods, attributes, simple type aliases), in both directions. A few of the most condensed constructs — the fused result helpers like ok1() / okAdd(), and Tr (Task<IActionResult>) — are not expanded in the view yet, but hovering them already explains what they do. More expansion is on the way.

Feedback

Issues and ideas welcome at github.com/Smoower/vscode-minified/issues. Building from source? See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

See LICENSE.