Turnal for VS Code

See which AI turn wrote the line under your cursor, retrace what your agents changed, and roll back a bad turn safely, all without leaving the editor.

Turnal reads from a local flight recorder of your agents’ work. The extension surfaces that history inside VS Code and hands every history operation to the turnal CLI, so the CLI stays the single source of truth for durable logs, checkpoints, blame, and safe rollbacks.

What you get

• Blame for the current line. A quiet end-of-line note shows the agent, prompt, turn, and relative time for the line you’re on. Hover it for the full turn context, with links to that turn’s diff, details, and rollback.

• Your agent history, two ways. The Turnal view in the Activity Bar groups recorded turns and rollbacks by session, or flattens everything into a newest-first Recent Activity list. Both layouts are backed entirely by the CLI.

• Native turn diffs. Click a completed turn to open exactly what it changed in VS Code’s built-in diff, whether single-file or multi-file, with no custom viewer to learn.

• Safe rollback, previewed first. Roll Back to Before Turn… runs a dry run, checks for affected unsaved editors, and opens the exact file plan in VS Code’s native Changes editor before asking for confirmation. It verifies that plan again before touching the workspace.

Editor rollbacks always use Turnal’s checkpoint-only mode, even when rollback.mode is set to workspace-git. The extension never moves your project’s Git HEAD or index; use the CLI when you intentionally want the more invasive workspace-Git restore.

Recording, replay, verification, search, retention, worktree management, and configuration editing stay in the CLI by design. The extension also never reads .turnal/index or private Git objects directly, so its behavior tracks the installed CLI instead of coupling to internal storage.

Screenshots

Inline blame and turn details

Hover the current line to see the agent, prompt, tools, session, turn, and links to the recorded changes.

Native turn changes

Completed turns open as familiar, read-only multi-file changes in VS Code’s built-in diff editor.

Native rollback preview

Before confirmation, Turnal opens the complete rollback plan against the live workspace in the same native changes UI.

Requirements

• VS Code 1.95 or newer.
• A Turnal CLI that exposes sessions JSON schema 1, planned for CLI release 0.0.1.
• A workspace initialized with turnal init and at least one completed turn, so there’s history to blame and diff.

Install the CLI

Install or update the release build with npm:

npm install -g @aadijo/turnal@latest
turnal version

If the installed CLI is older, the sidebar shows Turnal CLI needs an update and keeps the incompatibility visible instead of showing empty history.

Commands and settings

• Turnal: Refresh History clears cached session and blame data.
• Turnal: Show Recent Activity switches the sidebar to a newest-first list across sessions.
• Turnal: Group by Session restores the session hierarchy.
• Turnal: View Turn Changes opens a completed turn in the native diff or multi-file Changes editor.
• Turnal: Show Turn Details opens the CLI’s readable turnal show output.
• Turnal: Roll Back to Before Turn… previews and performs a checkpoint rollback.
• Turnal: Toggle Inline Blame flips turnal.inlineBlame.enabled for the workspace; the sidebar icon reflects the current state.
• turnal.history.layout persists the sidebar layout as sessions or activity.
• turnal.cliPath selects the CLI executable and defaults to turnal.

Inline blame is suppressed when the editor text differs from the latest completed checkpoint. Missing attribution is safer than pinning a turn to shifted or locally edited lines.

Develop

cd apps/vscode
npm install
npm test

Open apps/vscode as the VS Code workspace and press F5 to launch the Extension Development Host. To use a repository build of the CLI, set turnal.cliPath to the absolute path of bin/turnal after running make build at the repository root.

Package a local VSIX with:

npm run package