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, support for the VS Code Web platform, and ongoing compatibility and performance fixes.

And the extension can be installed from 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 full-document matches are cached by document version, highlight rule, and match range, reducing repeated scanning during refreshes 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.
• Runs on the VS Code Web platform, so it activates in vscode.dev and github.dev as well as on the desktop. This raises the minimum supported VS Code version to 1.74.0. See VS Code Web.
• Added textmarker.defaultSaveTarget with Workspace and Global save modes.
• Added optional textmarker.autoSaveOnToggle persistence.
• Clear All Highlights persists the cleared rules instead of only emptying the in-memory list, and a failed settings write is reported instead of failing silently.
• Added optional user-defined highlight colors through textmarker.userColor and textmarker.useUserColor.
• Uses the One Half Dark accent palette by default.
• Removed the upstream plugin's telemetry functionality. This extension does not collect any information.

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, in the Workspace or Global settings selected by textmarker.defaultSaveTarget.
• 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. The two names are relative to different things:

• workspace (default): relative to the project you have open. A single folder writes <folder>/.vscode/settings.json; a multi-root workspace writes the "settings" section of its .code-workspace file. Rules saved here apply to that project only. In a Remote-SSH or WSL window that file lives on the remote machine.
• global: relative to the environment you work in, not to the repository, and not shared between different environments. Which file that is depends on the kind of window; see Which File global Writes.

textmarker.defaultSaveTarget accepts only workspace and global. A value it does not recognise, for example prompt left over from an older version, is treated as workspace. When the workspace target is set and no folder is open, the extension writes Global settings rather than prompting. Multi-root Workspaces write the "settings" section of the .code-workspace file.

Which File global Writes

• Local desktop window: your user settings file, which is %APPDATA%\Code\User\settings.json on Windows, ~/.config/Code/User/settings.json on Linux, or ~/Library/Application Support/Code/User/settings.json on macOS. An active profile uses .../User/profiles/<profile>/settings.json instead. Rules then apply to every folder you open in that VS Code install.
• Remote-SSH or WSL window: ~/.vscode-server/data/Machine/settings.json on the remote server, as soon as textmarker.savedHighlights has a value there. Rules then apply to every folder you open through that server. That remote value also wins over the local user settings file, which is why a saved highlight can look when you only check the local file. Open it with Preferences: Open Remote Settings (JSON).
• vscode.dev or github.dev: vscode-userdata:/User/settings.json in the browser profile, so rules apply to every repository you open in that browser. See VS Code Web.

A narrower scope always wins over a wider one, in this order: the folder's .vscode/settings.json, the workspace or .code-workspace settings, the remote machine settings, your local user settings, then the extension defaults.

textmarker.autoSaveOnToggle is enabled by default, so textmarker.toggleHighlight saves all current rules right after it changes the highlight:

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

Set it to false to keep saving manual, then run TextMarker: Save All Highlights from the Command Palette. Set defaultSaveTarget to global for different save behavior.

VS Code Web

The extension also runs in web VS Code, such as vscode.dev and github.dev. There the full-document matching runs inside the extension host, because the web host provides no Node.js worker threads.

Save targets are adjusted for the web host:

• On a virtual workspace such as github.dev, the workspace target writes .vscode/settings.json through the virtual file system. That write is an uncommitted browser-session change and its content is lost on Developer: Reload Window, so the extension stores highlights in Global settings instead. Global settings live in the browser profile and survive reloads.
• When the web host has a folder from your own machine, the workspace target keeps using Workspace settings, because that file system is durable.
• global behaves as on the desktop.

Global settings belong to the browser profile, so rules saved in one repository also appear in the other repositories you open in that same browser. Two ways to keep the rules of one repository on their own:

• Create a profile for that repository. Web VS Code associates a profile with the current folder or workspace, so its textmarker.savedHighlights entry lives in that profile's settings file. Profile syncing is not available on the web.
• Add the textmarker.savedHighlights entry to .vscode/settings.json yourself and commit it. The commit is what makes the write durable, because an uncommitted change in a virtual workspace is not restored after a reload.

On the web that profile file is vscode-userdata:/User/settings.json, backed by IndexedDB for the vscode.dev or github.dev origin. Nothing is written to GitHub servers, so a saved rule costs no repository change and no API call. Open it with Preferences: Open User Settings (JSON), or clear rules with Clear All Highlights, which saves the cleared list for you. It removes the saved rules from the scope that currently provides them, the folder's .vscode/settings.json or the User settings on the web, so rules kept in a different scope remain until you clear them there.

Saved rules are never pruned automatically: a rule whose text no longer exists stays until you remove it.

The extension reads editor text and settings only. It declares support for both virtual workspaces and untrusted workspaces.

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.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.