Better Byte
Better Byte highlights and color-codes your comments to make them instantly recognizable and actionable.
Categorize your comments with:
- Alerts (red) - Important warnings and critical information
- Queries (blue) - Questions and things to investigate
- TODOs (orange) - Tasks that need to be completed
- Highlights (green) - Important information and notes
- FIXME (yellow background) - Issues that need fixing
- HACK (orange background) - Temporary workarounds
- BUG (red background) - Known bugs and issues
- UNDO (blue background) - Things to be removed/reverted
- Commented-out code (gray strikethrough) - Code that you're scared to delete
Works with: OpenTofu, YAML, JSON, Python, Terraform, TypeScript, and 50+ other languages.
✨ Features
- 🎨 Highlight important comments with custom tags and colors
- 🌍 Supports dozens of languages (including HCL, Python, PowerShell, YAML, and more)
- 🚀 Works in Remote-WSL, Codespaces, and all VSCode environments
- ⚙️ Dynamic language registration:
- By default, highlights comments in all installed languages
- Or, specify exactly which languages to enable via settings
- 🎯 Customizable tags:
- Change tag text, color, underline, bold, italic, and more
- Case-insensitive matching: Tags like "TODO", "todo", "Todo" all work the same
- 📝 Multiline and single-line comment support
- 📄 Plaintext highlighting (optional)
⚙️ Configuration
You can configure Better Byte in User or Workspace settings.
📋 Example Settings
"better-byte.multilineComments": true,
"better-byte.highlightPlainText": false,
"better-byte.languages": ["solidity", "javascript", "typescript"], // Optional: restrict to these languages
"better-byte.tags": [
{
"tag": "!",
"color": "#FF2D00",
"strikethrough": false,
"underline": false,
"backgroundColor": "transparent",
"bold": false,
"italic": false
},
{
"tag": "?",
"color": "#3498DB"
},
{
"tag": "//",
"color": "#474747",
"strikethrough": true
},
{
"tag": "TODO",
"color": "#FF8C00"
},
{
"tag": "*",
"color": "#28FF00"
},
{
"tag": "FIXME",
"color": "#000000",
"backgroundColor": "#FFCC00"
},
{
"tag": "HACK",
"color": "#000000",
"backgroundColor": "#FF8C00"
},
{
"tag": "BUG",
"color": "#000000",
"backgroundColor": "#FF2D00"
},
{
"tag": "UNDO",
"color": "#000000",
"backgroundColor": "#3498DB"
}
]
🔧 Settings Reference
better-byte.multilineComments
Enable/disable styling for multiline comments.
better-byte.highlightPlainText
Enable/disable highlighting in plaintext files.
better-byte.languages
Array of language IDs to enable highlighting for.
Leave empty to use all installed languages.
better-byte.tags
List of tag objects to customize how comments are highlighted.
🌍 Supported Languages
Better Byte supports all languages with a registered comment configuration in VSCode, including but not limited to:
- Ada, AL, Apex, AsciiDoc, BrightScript, C, C#, C++, ColdFusion, Clojure, COBOL, CoffeeScript, CSS, Dart, Dockerfile, Elixir, Elm, Erlang, F#, Fortran, gdscript, GenStat, Go, GraphQL, Groovy, Haskell, Haxe, HCL, OpenTofu, HiveQL, HTML, Java, JavaScript, JavaScript React, JSON with comments, Julia, Kotlin, LaTeX, Less, Lisp, Lua, Makefile, Markdown, Nim, MATLAB, Objective-C, Objective-C++, Pascal, Perl, Perl 6, PHP, Pig, PlantUML, PL/SQL, PowerShell, Puppet, Python, R, Racket, Ruby, Rust, SAS, Sass, Scala, SCSS, ShaderLab, ShellScript, SQL, STATA, Stylus, Svelte, Swift, Tcl, Terraform, Twig, TypeScript, TypeScript React, Verilog, Visual Basic, Vue.js, XML, YAML, and more!
🔍 How It Works
Better Byte scans your code for comments matching your configured tags and applies your chosen styles.
It works with both single-line and block comments, and can be extended to new languages automatically.
🤝 Contributing
Pull requests and feature suggestions are welcome!
See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.
📄 License
See LICENSE.md.
🙏 Credits
Originally inspired by Better Comments by aaron-bond.
Better Byte is a modern, actively maintained fork with new features and broader language support.
📝 Changelog
See CHANGELOG.md for release notes.
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