Generic Expand Selection

Smartly expand or shrink your code selection, recover from misclicks or accidental cursor moves.

Features

Expansion Rules

• Token Expansion: Expands to word tokens, including identifiers with underscores and dots
• Quote Scopes: Expands to content within quotes (", ', `)
• Bracket Scopes: Expands to content within brackets ([], {}, ())
• Line Expansion: Expands to full line content
• Selection History: Remember previous selections for step-by-step shrinking

Usage

Keybindings

• Expand Selection: Ctrl+E (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+E (Mac)
• Retract Selection: Ctrl+Shift+E (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+Shift+E (Mac)

[!TIP] Both commands work with single and multiple cursor selections.

Expansion Examples

Text: const config = { url: 'https://example.com' };

With cursor on `xamp`, next expansions will be:
→ example
→ example.com
→ https://example.com
→ 'https://example.com'
→ url: 'https://example.com'
→ { url: 'https://example.com' }
→ const config = { url: 'https://example.com' }
→ const config = { url: 'https://example.com' };

Configuration

Customize token expansion by adding genericExpandSelection.token.patterns to your settings.json. This setting takes an array of regex strings, which are tried in order. You can set a global default and override it for specific languages.

{
  // Global setting for all languages
  "genericExpandSelection.token.patterns": [
    "[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+", // matches alphanumeric characters, underscores, and hyphens
    "[a-zA-Z0-9_\\-.]+", // matches identifiers with dots
    "[^\\s[\\]{}()\"'`]+" // matches any non-whitespace, non-bracket character
  ],

  // Override for a specific language (e.g., TypeScript)
  "[typescript]": {
    "genericExpandSelection.token.patterns": [
      "\\w+" // In TypeScript, only match word characters
    ]
  }
}

Commands

• genericExpandSelection.expand: Expand Selection
• genericExpandSelection.shrink: Shrink Selection

Development

# Install dependencies
pnpm install

# Type check and lint (TypeScript and ESLint)
pnpm run check

# Run tests (builds TypeScript, runs esbuild, then executes tests)
pnpm run test

# Watch for changes and rebuild
pnpm run watch

# Build, type check, lint, and package extension as out.vsix
pnpm run build

# Build and install the packaged extension locally (outputs out.vsix and installs it)
pnpm run local

License

MIT License