Text Marker Plus

This is an independently maintained distribution derived from ryu1kn/vscode-text-marker. It is a community-maintained continuation branch: it preserves the original Text Marker behavior while adding configurable save targets, optional automatic saving after Toggle Highlight, and ongoing compatibility and performance fixes.

And the extention can be installed from the the market.

Differences from Upstream

This distribution is maintained independently from the upstream project. It currently differs from the original plugin in these areas:

• Full-document matching runs in a dedicated worker instead of blocking the VS Code Extension Host.
• Completed matches are cached by document version and highlight rule, while stale asynchronous results are discarded safely.
• Highlights refresh in every currently visible editor pane, including split panes that do not have focus. Tabs that are open but not visible refresh when they become visible.
• Added textmarker.defaultSaveTarget with Workspace, Global, and Prompt save modes.
• Added optional textmarker.autoSaveOnToggle persistence.
• Added optional user-defined highlight colors through textmarker.userColor and textmarker.useUserColor.
• Uses the One Half Dark accent palette by default.

Normal runtime behavior: The visible editor region is highlighted first, while matches elsewhere are completed asynchronously in the background.

[!NOTE] Staged rendering demonstration

This GIF was recorded with an intentional 5-second delay inserted before background full-document matching. The delay exists only to make the staged rendering behavior clearly visible.

Please compare:

• highlights inside the currently visible editor area;
• highlights shown elsewhere in the sidebar or overview ruler.

The visible editor area is highlighted first. Highlights outside the current area appear after asynchronous background matching completes.

The 5-second delay is not part of normal runtime behavior. This GIF demonstrates progressive rendering order, not production matching latency.

Features

• Highlight or unhighlight selected text, or the word under the cursor.
• Highlight every matching occurrence in the current editor.
• Highlight text using regular expressions.
• Toggle case-sensitive or case-insensitive matching.
• Toggle whole-word or partial matching.
• Update existing highlight rules.
• Jump to the next or previous occurrence of the same highlight rule.
• Configure highlight colors, opacity, ruler colors, and status-bar buttons.
• Save highlights and restore them when an editor opens, and can choose the saving place.
• Optionally save all highlights whenever Toggle Highlight adds or removes a rule.

Commands

Toggle Highlight, Update Highlight, and next/previous navigation are also available from the editor context menu where configured.

Save Behavior

Saved rules are stored in textmarker.savedHighlights.

textmarker.defaultSaveTarget controls where Save All Highlights writes:

• workspace (default): current Workspace settings.
• global: User/Global settings.
• prompt: show the original Workspace/Global selection prompt.

If workspace is selected while no Workspace is open, the extension falls back to the selection prompt instead of silently writing to Global settings. This also works with multi-root Workspaces.

Set textmarker.autoSaveOnToggle to true to combine toggling and saving:

{
  "textmarker.defaultSaveTarget": "workspace",
  "textmarker.autoSaveOnToggle": true
}

With this configuration, running textmarker.toggleHighlight updates the visual highlight and immediately saves all current rules to Workspace settings. Set defaultSaveTarget to global or prompt for different save behavior.

Other Settings

• textmarker.highlightColors: colors assigned to new highlights.
• textmarker.userColor: user-defined colors that extend the default highlight palette when textmarker.useUserColor is enabled. Despite its singular name, this setting accepts an array.
• textmarker.useUserColor: when true, adds textmarker.userColor values to the highlight color cycle. When false, configured user colors are ignored.
• textmarker.defaultHighlightOpacity: opacity from 0 to 1.

The default highlight palette follows the One Half Dark accent colors, with several additional colors:

When textmarker.useUserColor is enabled, colors from textmarker.userColor are assigned after these colors. When the combined color set is exhausted, assignment starts again from its first color. The default user-color array is empty.

• textmarker.enableIgnoreCase: initial case-insensitive mode.
• textmarker.enableWholeMatch: initial whole-match mode.
• textmarker.useHighlightColorOnRuler: use highlight colors on the ruler.
• textmarker.autoSelectDistinctiveTextColor: choose contrasting text color.
• textmarker.hideStatusBarItems: hide matching-mode status-bar controls.
• textmarker.delayForRefreshingHighlight: refresh delay in milliseconds; null disables refresh on document changes.
• textmarker.commandsOnContextMenu: control commands shown in the context menu.

Development

Use Node.js 22.23.0 and Yarn:

yarn install --frozen-lockfile
yarn run check

Focused commands:

yarn run unit-test -- --grep "pattern"
yarn run acceptance-test
yarn run compile

License

MIT License. The original copyright and license notice are retained in LICENSE.txt.