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 glossary 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 for others.

Installation

See Visual Studio Instructions.

Getting Started

See setting up glossaries and defining terminology usage guides for details on getting started with Contextive.

Features

• Initialize your Contextive Glossary File
• Auto-complete from your Contextive Glossary
  • Shows definitions in auto-complete details
• Hover to show definitions from your Contextive Glossary
  • 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
• Put your glossaries near the code they support:
  • Terms relevant for the whole repository
  • Different terms relevant in different repositories
  • Terms relevant only in a subfolder of the repository

Coming Soon

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

Known Issues

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

See All Contextive Visual Studio Issues.