Multi-Scope Highlighter

A focus-assist highlighting tool for VS Code. Highlight multiple words with distinct colors, manage scopes across files, and toggle between visual styles and levels of opacity.

✨ Features

Multi-Word & File Highlighting

Highlight multiple different words simultaneously. Each new word gets a unique, high-contrast color automatically.

• Smart Coloring: Colors are automatically selected from a palette of 20 distinct, high-visibility hues.
• Adaptive Themes: Colors automatically adjust to look great in both Dark (Neon/Pastel) and Light (Deep/Contrast) themes.
• Gutter markers: Matching elements shown in gutter markers of the same color.

Multi Scopes

Control where your highlights appear using the Status Bar switcher:

• Single File: Highlights only appear in the active editor.
• All Open Files: Highlights automatically propagate to all visible editors (split panes, grid layouts).

Multiple Styles

Toggle between three visual modes to suit your preference:

• Fill: Solid background color (clean, low noise).

• Box: 2px Outline border with transparent background (minimalist).

• Hybrid: Both fill and box.

The contrast can be set two ways:

• Auto:

• Black and white:

The auto mode works better for low opacity settings:

• Opacity: 10%:

• Opacity: 35%:

• Opacity: 75%:

⚙️ Advanced Management

Use the "Manage Highlights" command to fine-tune your setup without restarting:

• In-Place Editing: Rename highlighted patterns instantly.
  • Toggle between:
    • Plain text
    • Whole words
    • Regular expressions
• Mode Cycling: Toggle a highlight between Plain Text, Whole Word \b, and Regex .* modes with a single click.
• Color Picker: Manually reassign colors, with a smart filter that hides colors already in use.

Profile Persistence

Stop re-highlighting the same logs every day.

• Save Profile: Save your current set of highlights to a named JSON file in your workspace.
• Load Profile: Instantly restore a debugging context.

🛠️ Configuration

• Customize the visual appearance of highlights directly from the Status Bar.

• All controlled from a single widget

🚀 Usage

Adding & Removing Highlights

Quick Reference:

• Column select bulk add, and covert from string to word to eliminate unwanted matches:

Tip: All keybindings are customizable via VS Code's Keyboard Shortcuts editor.

Smart Delimiter Stripping:

When adding highlights from selections, unmatched delimiter pairs are automatically removed to ensure clean pattern matching:

• Supported pairs: () [] {} "" '' `` ``** ~~ __ ..`
• Multi-character support: Handles consecutive delimiters like **bold**, [[link]], ...ellipsis...
• Auto-balance: If selection is "Service..." but full text is "...Service...", the trailing ... is stripped to give Service
• Whitespace trimmed: Leading/trailing spaces are removed before processing

Example: Selecting **word** highlights as word, but selecting **word highlights as word (unmatched ** removed).

Column/Block Selection Support:

Both keybindings (Alt+Q and Shift+Alt+Q) fully support column selection mode:

• Multiple selections: All selected text blocks are processed simultaneously
• Deduplication: Unique words across all selections are highlighted automatically
• Remove mode: If any selection overlaps existing highlights, those highlights are removed

Noise Character Filtering:

When using Shift+Alt+Q to highlight multiple words from a selection, common punctuation and symbols are automatically filtered out:

• Default exclusions: -, =, :, ,, ;, ., !, ?, |, &, +, *, /, \, brackets, quotes, and more
• Customizable: Edit the multiScopeHighlighter.excludeNoiseWords setting to add or remove items from the filter list
• Feedback: The status message shows how many noise words were filtered (e.g., "Highlighted 5 word(s) (filtered 3 noise)")

Status Bar Controls

Look for the indicators in the bottom right of your VS Code window:

• $(files) Single / All: Switch scope.
• $(paintcan) Fill / Hybrid / Box: Cycle visual style.
• $(circle-filled) 35%: Set highlight opacity (opens picker).
• $(color-mode) Auto / B&W: Toggle high-contrast text mode.

The "Manage Highlights" Workflow

Run the command Highlight: Manage Current Highlights to see a list of active patterns.

• Click a Row: Opens the Color Picker for that specific word.
• ✏️ (Pencil): Edit the text pattern (e.g., fix a typo).
• [abc] / [ab] / [.*] (Mode): Click this icon to cycle the matching mode:
  • [abc] Text: Simple literal match.
  • [ab] Whole Word: Matches \bword\b only.
  • [.*] Regex: Treats the text as a Regular Expression.

⌨️ Extension Commands

You can access these via the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P / Cmd+Shift+P):

Highlighting Commands

• Highlight: Open Menu
• Highlight: Toggle Selection
• Highlight: Add Word(s) at Cursor or from Selection
• Highlight: Manage Current Highlights
• Highlight: Clear All
• Highlight: Undo Last Change - Undo highlight operations (Ctrl+Alt+Z / Cmd+Option+Z)
• Highlight: Redo Last Change - Redo highlight operations (Ctrl+Alt+Y / Cmd+Option+Y)
• Highlight: Toggle Scope (Single/All Open)
• Highlight: Toggle Style (Box/Fill/Hybrid)
• Highlight: Set Opacity
• Highlight: Toggle Text Contrast

• Most of these are also available from the main menu:

Profile Commands

• Highlight: Profile Menu - Quick access to all profile operations (Ctrl+Alt+Q / Cmd+Option+Q)
• Highlight: Save Profile - Save current highlights to a named profile
• Highlight: Load Profile - Load highlights from a saved profile
• Highlight: Switch Profile - Quick switch between profiles with last modified timestamps
• Highlight: New Profile - Clear all highlights and start a fresh profile
• Highlight: Merge Profile - Add highlights from another profile without replacing current ones
• Highlight: Duplicate Profile - Create a copy of an existing profile with a new name
• Highlight: Load Template - Start from built-in templates (TODO Markers, Error & Debugging, Security & Performance)
• Highlight: Delete Profile - Remove a saved profile

• Also visible on the Highlight: Profile Menu:

� Profile Management

Profiles let you save, switch, and reuse highlight configurations for different tasks.

Quick Access

Press Ctrl+Alt+Q (or Cmd+Option+Q on Mac) to open the Profile Menu with all profile operations.

Profile Features

• Save Profile: Store your current highlights with a custom name
• Load Profile: Replace current highlights with a saved profile
• Switch Profile: Quick picker showing all profiles with last modified timestamps
• New Profile: Clear all highlights and start fresh with a confirmation prompt
• Merge Profile: Add highlights from another profile to your current ones (non-destructive)
• Duplicate Profile: Create a copy of a profile with a new name for experimentation
• Load Template: Start from built-in templates:
  • TODO Markers: Common task annotations (TODO, FIXME, NOTE, HACK, etc.)
  • Error & Debugging: Error keywords, log levels, and debugging patterns
  • Security & Performance: Security-sensitive terms and performance-critical patterns
  • Choose to Merge (add to current) or Replace (clear all first)

Storage & Privacy

• Location: Profiles are saved as JSON files in .vscode/highlights/ within your workspace
• Sharing: Commit profiles to version control to share with your team
• Metadata: Each profile tracks creation date, last modified timestamp, scope, and name
• Runtime: Active highlights exist only in memory unless saved to a profile
• Backward Compatible: Supports legacy profile format for seamless migration