Tack — Code Comments & Sticky Notes

Pin comments to lines of code and share them with your team through git. Tack keeps notes where the code is, follows them as the code moves, and commits them so the next developer actually sees them. It also gives you a free-floating sticky note board for everything that isn't about one particular line.

Two independent features, with no overlap between them:

Why not just write a // TODO?

Because a TODO in the source is a change to the source. Tack's comments live beside your code rather than in it, so you can leave a question on a line you don't own, annotate a file you're only reading, or mark up a dependency during a review — without touching a single line and without polluting a diff.

And unlike a private bookmark extension, Tack's comments are committed. Your colleague pulls, opens the file, and sees your note on the line it belongs to, with your name on it.

Feature one: code comments

Put the cursor on a line and press Ctrl+Alt+N (Cmd+Alt+N on macOS), right-click and choose Add Comment at Cursor, or click the + that appears in the gutter when you hover a line.

A comment is deliberately quiet — one marker, not a row of them:

Nothing is drawn in the breakpoint gutter and nothing is appended after your code.

Comments follow the code

This is the hard part, and Tack takes it seriously.

While a file is open, every edit is translated exactly: insert ten lines above a comment and it moves down ten lines. No guessing, no drift.

When a file changes behind VS Code's back — a git pull, a branch switch, an editor you never had open — the comment is re-found by matching the text of the line it was attached to, searching outward from where it used to be and using the surrounding lines to choose between duplicates.

If the line is genuinely gone, the comment is marked detached rather than deleted. It moves to a Detached group in the sidebar and you can re-anchor it to a new line. Comments are never silently lost.

Built for a team

Every comment records who wrote it, taken from git config user.name, and shows that name in the widget, the hover and the sidebar. The storage file is sorted by file and then by line, so two people commenting on the same file produce a small, readable merge conflict instead of an unreadable one.

Feature two: the sticky note board

An infinite canvas for the thinking that isn't about one particular line — a plan, a question, a scratch list.

Commands

Everything is under the Tack prefix in the command palette.

Sharing with your team

Commit .tack/comments.json. That is the whole point — a comment nobody else can see is just a private note.

.tack/ is deliberately not under .vscode/, which a great many projects gitignore wholesale. Storing shared data there would have it silently excluded from commits, with nothing to warn you.

The board sits in the same directory and is shared by default too. If you would rather keep it to yourself, add one line to .gitignore:

.tack/board.json

Storage format

.tack/comments.json, grouped by file and ordered by line so git diffs stay small:

{
  "version": 1,
  "comments": [
    {
      "id": "7b1f3c2a-9d4e-4a61-8f0b-2c5d6e7a8b90",
      "text": "Rewrite the retry backoff before the release.",
      "path": "src/net/retry.ts",
      "line": 41,
      "fingerprint": "const delay = base * 2 ** attempt;",
      "context": "1n7kq2",
      "author": "Ada Lovelace",
      "createdAt": "2026-09-03T18:20:00.000Z",
      "updatedAt": "2026-09-03T18:27:30.000Z"
    }
  ]
}

path is workspace-relative with forward slashes so it works across machines; line is 0-based; fingerprint is the trimmed text of the anchored line and context a hash of its neighbours, both used to re-find the line after the file changes. author is omitted when git has no identity configured.

Both files are watched, so hand edits and incoming commits show up live. A malformed, half-written or briefly missing file is tolerated rather than throwing away data.

Requirements and limits

• An open folder or workspace. Storage is per workspace.
• Not available in Restricted Mode or virtual workspaces (vscode.dev, remote repositories). Tack reads and writes real files and runs git to identify comment authors.
• Branch switches can move or detach comments. The fingerprint search absorbs a lot of it; the rest is inherent to annotating code out-of-band.
• There is no way for an extension to draw a genuinely floating card on top of the text editor — the API for it (createWebviewTextEditorInset) is proposal-only and cannot ship. Code comments therefore use VS Code's own comment widget as their editing surface.

Upgrading

Storage moved out of .vscode/ in 5.0.0. On first run, .vscode/board.json, .vscode/sticky-notes.json and .vscode/code-comments.json are moved into .tack/. Nothing already in .tack/ is overwritten, and a move that fails leaves the original untouched. Commands moved from the stickyNotes. prefix to tack. in 4.0.0 — rebind any custom keybindings. See the changelog.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome at github.com/anubhavpathak99/vscode-tack.

npm install
npm run watch     # esbuild + tsc in watch mode
npm test          # runs the suite in a real VS Code instance

Press F5 to launch the Extension Development Host.

License

MIT