Open File Lines 📄 🔗 ⚡

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Put the cursor on a path reference in any text, press Alt+P, and the file opens with the referenced lines selected.

episodes/e03.md            -> opens the file, selects nothing
episodes/e03.md:300        -> opens the file, goes to line 300 and selects it
episodes/e03.md:494-586    -> opens the file, goes to line 494 and selects lines 494-586

Wrapping the reference in backticks or quotes changes nothing — `episodes/e03.md:494-586` works exactly like the bare form, and so do markdown links, <angle brackets>, and references followed by a comma or a full stop.

📦 Install

Search for Open File Lines in the Extensions view, or:

code --install-extension bytecoded.open-file-lines

⌨️ Commands and keys

Both are also in the editor context menu. If you have text selected, the selection is used as the reference instead of the token under the cursor.

🔗 Reference syntax

A backwards range (path:586-494) is read as the same range. Line numbers past the end of the file are clamped to the last line. path(300,12) is not supported: parentheses have to end a reference so that [text](https://github.com/vkostyanetsky/vscode-open-file-lines/blob/HEAD/path:1-2) keeps working.

🧭 How a path is resolved

The first existing entry wins:

1. absolute paths (including C:\…, file://…, ~/…, ${workspaceFolder}/…, ${userHome}/…, %VAR%) as they are;
2. relative to the folder of the file the reference lives in;
3. relative to each workspace root, starting with the one that owns the current file;
4. relative to every folder in openFileLines.searchPaths.

If the reference has no extension, the ones from openFileLines.extensions are tried in order. When nothing matches, a warning appears with a Show searched paths button that lists every location that was probed in the Open File Lines output channel. A reference that points at a folder reveals it in the explorer.

⚙️ Settings

🛠️ Development

npm install

npm test

npm test runs the parsing and path-resolution suites in plain node — no VSCode instance needed. Press F5 to launch an Extension Development Host; samples/links.md has references to try against samples/episodes/e03.md, which is 600 numbered lines long.

🧪 Install locally without packaging

Uninstall the Marketplace build first. Two copies contribute the same commands and both bind Alt+P, and VSCode picks between them by scan order:

code --uninstall-extension bytecoded.open-file-lines

Then copy or symlink this folder into your extensions directory and restart VSCode:

cmd //c mklink //d "%USERPROFILE%\.vscode\extensions\bytecoded.open-file-lines" "D:\Me\Projects\vscode-open-file-lines"

The folder name is a convention rather than a requirement — VSCode reads the identifier from package.json — but publisher.name keeps it in line with every other entry in that directory.

Or build a .vsix:

npx @vscode/vsce package

📜 Prior art, and why this exists

The token-under-cursor handling, the search-path fallbacks and the extension guessing reproduce the behaviour of Fr43nk.seito-openfile — a mature and actively maintained extension in this space. Its path resolution is a good deal richer than what I built here: leading-path mapping, glob-based subfolder search, per-language extension guessing, a quick-open fallback. For pointing at plain paths in code and in terminal output, use it.

And this extension exists because it is optimised for references embedded in prose. Notes, review comments, transcripts — text where a reference sits inside a sentence, wrapped in punctuation, and points at a range of lines rather than at a single line. Here, for example, is a line from the notes it was written for:

- She speaks briefly and directly. (/episodes/e01.md:448-487; /episodes/e01.md:972-1012)

Three requirements have to hold at once here:

1. The range has to survive tokenisation. : and - must stay inside the token, or 448-487 stops being a range — while every other punctuation mark around it has to be cut away. That takes two separate mechanisms: a delimiter set that ends a token, and a trim pass for wrapping punctuation (DEFAULT_DELIMITERS and TRIM_LEADING / TRIM_TRAILING in src/parse.js). A single word-boundary character class cannot express "( ends the token but - does not, and a trailing full stop is punctuation rather than part of the name".

2. Parentheses have to be delimiters, which means giving up path(300,12), the compiler-diagnostic form. That trade-off is deliberate: markdown links and parenthesised asides are everywhere in prose, MSVC diagnostics are not. An extension aimed at build output should make the opposite call — and seito-openfile does, which is why a reference written as (path:448-487 does not resolve there.

3. A malformed range must not silently succeed. Parsed loosely, path:972-1012 yields line 972: the file opens, the range is quietly dropped, and nothing looks wrong. Here the position suffix is matched by anchored regexes, so a reference either parses as a range or is left alone as part of the path.