Markdown Link Title

A Visual Studio Code extension. Install it from the VS Code Marketplace, or from the command line with code --install-extension antoinekh.markdown-link-title.

Paste a URL into a Markdown file and get [Page Title](https://github.com/antoinekh/markdown-link-title/blob/HEAD/url) instead of a bare link. A small, fully auditable, customisable VS Code extension with zero runtime dependencies that honours your VS Code proxy settings.

What it does

• Paste a URL over a selection wraps the selected text as the label: [selection](https://github.com/antoinekh/markdown-link-title/blob/HEAD/url). No network call.
• Paste a URL with no selection inserts a placeholder link [fetching…](https://github.com/antoinekh/markdown-link-title/blob/HEAD/url) instantly, with the cursor after it so you can keep typing, then swaps fetching… for the page title as soon as the background fetch returns. The paste never blocks.
• If the fetch times out or fails (unreachable host, non-success status), the placeholder is replaced with the URL's hostname, e.g. [github.com](https://github.com/...), so you still get a usable link.
• If title fetching is disabled (markdownLinkTitle.fetchTitle: false), it inserts [](https://github.com/antoinekh/markdown-link-title/blob/HEAD/url) with the cursor between the brackets for you to type a label, with no network call.

It uses VS Code's native paste pipeline (DocumentPasteEditProvider). Because the fetch runs in the background after the paste is applied (rather than blocking the paste), there is no spinner and typing is never interrupted; the title simply appears in place a moment later.

Resolve titles on demand

Besides paste, the Markdown Link Title: Resolve Title for URL(s) command (also on the editor right-click menu when text is selected) titles links that are already in the document. It turns every bare http(s) URL and every empty Markdown link [](https://github.com/antoinekh/markdown-link-title/blob/HEAD/url) into [Page Title](https://github.com/antoinekh/markdown-link-title/blob/HEAD/url), fetching each title once and falling back to the hostname on failure. It runs over the selected text, or, with no selection, over the current line. Links that already have a label are left untouched, and the linkStyle setting is honoured (so reference produces [title][N] plus the [N]: url definitions).

Character encodings

Titles are decoded with the correct character encoding, so non-English pages come out right. UTF-8 (the modern default, which covers every alphabet including Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic, …) always works, and legacy encodings such as Shift_JIS, EUC-JP, EUC-KR, GBK, Big5 and ISO-8859-1 are handled too. The charset is taken from the response's Content-Type header, then from a <meta charset> declaration in the page, falling back to UTF-8. This uses the Node TextDecoder, so it still needs no dependencies.

Why a new extension

Several VS Code extensions turn URLs into Markdown links, but each falls short: PasteURL needs xclip on Linux and ships a deprecated dependency tree, Markdown Auto Link Title has no auditable source (its GitHub repo 404s), Url Title only runs as a command and not on paste, and URL title resolver for Markdown has had no update since 2021. This extension covers both paste and on-demand resolution, with zero runtime dependencies and full proxy support.

See docs/comparison.md for the detailed comparison, including a table mapping PasteURL's own reported issues to this extension's behaviour.

Settings

All settings live under markdownLinkTitle.*:

Default User-Agent

The title fetch is sent with the User-Agent Twitterbot/1.0 by default. This is deliberate: many popular sites (Unsplash, Reddit, Cloudflare-fronted pages, …) serve a JavaScript bot-wall to browser or unknown User-Agents, which a static fetch can never pass, so you would only ever get their challenge page. The same sites whitelist link-unfurling bots such as Twitterbot and Slackbot so their links preview nicely in chat and social apps, and they hand those bots clean og:title metadata, which is exactly the title this extension wants. Using a preview-bot User-Agent therefore returns the real title where a browser string fails.

Override it with markdownLinkTitle.userAgent if you prefer (for example a browser string, or Slackbot, which works equally well); leaving the setting empty uses the Twitterbot/1.0 default.

Proxy support

When http.proxySupport is at its default (override) or on, the extension uses the default Node agent, which the VS Code extension host has already patched to honour your proxy, including PAC scripts, system proxy, and authenticated proxies (Basic, NTLM, Kerberos). You do not need to configure anything beyond the standard http.* settings.

Only when http.proxySupport is off does the extension resolve the proxy itself, from http.proxy then the HTTPS_PROXY/HTTP_PROXY/ALL_PROXY (and NO_PROXY) environment variables, using a standard-library CONNECT tunnel. This minimal fallback supports an explicit proxy with optional Basic auth only.

Development

npm install
npm run compile    # type-check and emit to out/ (also used by tests)
npm test           # run unit tests with node --test
npm run bundle     # bundle to dist/extension.js with esbuild
npm run package    # production bundle for packaging into a .vsix

Press F5 in VS Code to launch an Extension Development Host and try it in a Markdown file.

The pure logic (url.ts, titleParser.ts, references.ts, selectionLinks.ts, and the proxy resolution in http.ts) imports no vscode API, so it is unit-tested directly.

Releasing

CI (.github/workflows/ci.yml) runs the tests and a production build on Linux, macOS and Windows for every push and pull request. To publish to the VS Code Marketplace, bump version in package.json, then push a matching tag:

git tag v0.1.0 && git push origin v0.1.0

The release workflow (.github/workflows/release.yml) packages the extension once and publishes it on tags matching v*:

• VS Code Marketplace via vsce, using a Personal Access Token in the VSCE_PAT repository secret.
• Open VSX (open-vsx.org) via ovsx, using a token in the OVSX_PAT repository secret. This step is skipped when OVSX_PAT is not set, so it is optional. Publishing to Open VSX also requires a one-time claimed namespace matching the publisher in package.json.