Contextive README

Contextive is a Visual Studio Code extension to assist developers in environments with a complex domain or project specific language, where words have a special meaning in the context of the project.

It should help new team members get up to speed more quickly in understanding domain-specific terms. By storing the term definitions in your repository, and surfacing the definitions as you work on the code, it encourages the use of the domain-specific terms in your code, and regularly updating the definitions as the team's understanding evolves.

[!WARNING]
This plugin is considered 'beta' status, as leverages relatively new Language Server Protocol support in the Preview Extensibility Model. Some features may not work or may not work as expected. Please report issues in this project and we will liaise with Microsoft & the Visual Studio team to resolve.

The main issue for most use cases is that the extension doesn't work when opening a solution file, only when opening a folder. See Issue #75 for details.

See known issues below for others.

Installation

See VsCode Installation Instructions.

Getting Started

Create a folder in your project root called .contextive. Create a file in that folder called definitions.yml.

Start defining your definitions following the schema specified in our usage guide. You might like to start by copying our default definitions file that defines the terms used in the definitions file itself.

Usage Guide

See our usage guide for details on the definitions file format and available options.

Features

• Initialize your Contextive Definitions
• Auto-complete from your Contextive Definitions
  • Shows definitions in auto-complete details
• Hover to show definitions from your Contextive Definitions
  • Hover over elements with suffixes & prefixes
  • Hover over usage of multiple terms combined using camelCase, PascalCase and snake_case
  • Hover over multi-word terms
  • Hover over plural of defined terms
  • Hover over aliases of defined terms
• Supported Repository Layouts:
  • A repository per context
  • Multiple contexts in the same repository (monorepo) (identified by path globs)
  • Context distributed over multiple repositories (#36)

Coming Soon

• UI to edit/manage Contextive Definitions
• Internationalization support
• Support for multiple contexts in separate repositories
• Better support for key word identification in different languages (e.g. different syntax delimiters)

Extension Settings

The extension does not currently support configuration. The definitions file must be in ./contextive/definitions.yml in your open folder.

Known Issues

• Doesn't work when opening a Solution, only when opening a folder
• Definitions don't update in hover panels when the definitions file is updated
• Doesn't work in all file types
• Markdown not supported in hover panel

See All Contextive Visual Studio Issues.