ADO PowerWiki for VS Code
Browse, search and edit a cloned Azure DevOps wiki as an ordinary folder,
with PowerWiki's Markdown, Mermaid, KaTeX and draw.io rendering. No Azure DevOps
connection, no sign-in, no PAT — everything comes from the files on disk and
git.
The Explorer is the page tree. Click a Markdown file that belongs to a wiki and
it opens as a rendered page instead of raw text.
Working in Azure DevOps too? PowerWiki for Azure DevOps is
the companion extension: the same rendering, editing and export, as a hub next
to the built-in wiki — plus comments, follow, and live Azure Boards work item
badges and query tables, which need the service and so cannot work off a clone.
The two share one codebase and read and write the same wiki repositories, so
you can move between them freely.
What works
|
|
| Browse and render |
Markdown (CommonMark + GFM), Mermaid, KaTeX, callouts, [[_TOSP_]] |
| Navigate |
Wiki links open the target page's file, so the Explorer stays in step |
| Search |
Full-text across the wiki, with highlighted snippets |
| Edit |
Code, split, and rich-text editors; drafts autosave |
| Page operations |
Create, rename, move, reorder (.order is maintained), delete |
| Attachments |
Insert, list, and replace — a local file has none of the API's create-only limits |
| Diagrams |
draw.io round-trips, storing revisions in .attachments |
| History |
git log --follow, so a renamed page keeps its whole history |
| Export |
Word (.docx), saved through a file dialog — optionally through your own Word template |
What is missing, and why
These need Azure DevOps itself, not the files, so they are absent rather than
broken:
- Comments — stored by the service, not in the repository.
- Follow / notifications — a subscription held by the service.
- Work item badges and
@mentions — rendered exactly as written, with
nothing fetched to fill them in. #1234 stays #1234.
- PDF export — it works by printing the rendered document, and a VS Code
webview has no print pipeline. Word export is offered instead; the PDF option
is hidden rather than shown and doing nothing.
Finding your wiki
Three layouts work with no configuration:
- the wiki clone is the folder you opened;
- the wiki is one folder of a multi-root workspace;
- the wiki is a subfolder (a docs wiki inside a code repository).
A folder is treated as a wiki when it has a .order file, or Markdown plus an
.attachments folder. If yours is nested deeper than two levels, or looks like
neither, name it explicitly:
{
"powerwiki.wikiRoots": ["docs/Product.wiki"], // absolute, or relative to the first folder
"powerwiki.discoveryDepth": 4, // how deep to search (default 2)
"powerwiki.includeMarkdownFolders": false, // treat any Markdown folder as a wiki
"powerwiki.openWikiPagesInPowerWiki": true // hand wiki pages to PowerWiki
}
Only Markdown inside a detected wiki is handed to PowerWiki; every other .md
file in the workspace opens as text as usual. PowerWiki: Open as Markdown
(also in the editor title bar) shows the raw source of the page you are on.
Which tab a page opens in
Pages follow VS Code's own convention rather than inventing one. A single
Explorer click opens the page in the reusable preview tab, so browsing a
wiki — clicking through the tree, following links between pages — leaves one
tab, not a trail of them. Double-clicking, or starting to edit, makes the tab
permanent, and a page that is already open is revealed rather than opened again.
Saving
Saving writes the file. It does not commit — that stays with your normal Git
workflow, unlike the Azure DevOps wiki where every save is a commit. When the
page is already open in a text editor, PowerWiki edits that document and saves
it, so the change lands in the undo stack rather than behind the editor's back.
Commands
| Command |
What it does |
| PowerWiki: Open in PowerWiki |
Render the selected Markdown file as a page |
| PowerWiki: Open as Markdown |
Show the current page's raw source |
| PowerWiki: Open Wiki Home |
Open the home page of a wiki in the workspace |
| PowerWiki: Rescan Workspace for Wikis |
Re-run discovery after moving folders |
Building it from source
From the repository root:
npm ci
npm run build:vscode # bundles the extension, webview and Monaco into vscode/dist
npm run package:vscode # produces vscode/powerwiki-vscode.vsix
npm run test:vscode # UI tests in a real VS Code window
Install the result with code --install-extension vscode/powerwiki-vscode.vsix,
or press F5 in this repository to launch an Extension Development Host.
The extension shares its entire UI with the Azure DevOps extension; see
AGENTS.md for the host boundary that makes that possible.
