🧰 Dev Tools Toolbox for VS Code

A developer toolbox in one place — 45 tools inside a single panel.
English · Русский

Dev Tools bundles the utilities developers reach for every day — JSON/YAML conversion, regex testing, JWT decoding, hash calculation, UUID/ULID generation, color helpers, formatting and many more — into one fast panel that lives inside VS Code. No browser tabs, no uploads, no telemetry.

✨ Highlights

45 tools organised into nine groups with instant search (Ctrl+K).
Three ways in: Command Palette / shortcut, an Activity Bar launcher with a native tool tree, and a status bar button that opens the panel directly.
Bilingual UI (English / Russian) that follows your VS Code display language and can be switched on the fly.
Local by default — every calculation happens on your machine. Only hashing, GZIP, RSA key generation and X.509 parsing run in the extension host; everything else runs in the webview.
No configuration required — open the panel and start typing.
Theme-aware interface built on VS Code theme colors (light, dark and high-contrast).
Keyboard driven — open with Ctrl+Alt+D (macOS: Cmd+Alt+D), search with Ctrl+K.

🚀 Getting started

Install the extension.
Open it in any of these ways:
- Ctrl+Alt+D / Cmd+Alt+D;
- Command Palette → Dev Tools: Open Dev Tools;
- click the Dev Tools icon in the Activity Bar and pick a tool from the tree (it opens the wide editor panel on that tool);
- click Dev Tools in the status bar.
Pick a tool in the panel sidebar or search for it with Ctrl+K.

🧩 Tools

🔄 Converters

Tool	What it does
Cron Parser	Explains a 5-field cron expression in plain words and shows the next eight runs. Supports `*`, `,`, `-`, `/` and `@daily`-style macros.
Date & Timestamp	Converts Unix seconds/milliseconds/microseconds, ISO 8601, UTC, local time, week numbers and relative time.
JSON Array to Table / CSV	Renders an array of objects as a table and exports CSV with a configurable delimiter.
JSON ↔ YAML	Two-way conversion with live validation and one-click swap.
Number Base	Converts integers between base 2, 8, 10, 16, 36 with a grouped binary view (BigInt-safe).
JSON → Code	C#, F#, TypeScript, JavaScript or PHP models from JSON; choose System.Text.Json or Newtonsoft.Json for .NET. Ships a ready-to-run deserialization snippet.
XML → Code	Same targets from an XML sample; .NET output uses `System.Xml.Serialization` (`XmlRoot`, `XmlAttribute`, `XmlElement`) and comes with an `XmlSerializer` snippet.

✏️ Text

Tool	What it does
Escape / Unescape	JSON, HTML, XML, URL, C#, SQL, CSV, shell, regex, Unicode and backslash escaping.
List Comparer	Shows added, removed and common lines between two lists.
Markdown Preview	Renders Markdown to sanitized HTML with an exportable HTML view.
Text Analyzer	Characters, words, sentences, entropy, reading time and the most frequent words.
Text Comparer	Line, word and character diffs with highlighted additions and removals.

🔐 Encoders / Decoders

Tool	What it does
Base64 Text	UTF-8 Base64 encoding and decoding, including the URL-safe alphabet.
Base64 Image	Image ⇄ data URL conversion with live preview and download.
Certificate Decoder	X.509 subject, issuer, validity, SAN, key usage and SHA-1/SHA-256 fingerprints.
GZIP	Compress and decompress GZIP streams transported as Base64.
HTML Entities	Encode and decode HTML entities with a reference table.
JWT Decoder	Decode header, payload and claims, check expiry, verify and create HS256/384/512 signatures.
QR Code	Generate QR codes with L/M/Q/H error correction and export to PNG or SVG.
URL Encode / Decode	Component and full-URL encoding plus a parsed query parameter table.

🧹 Formatters

Tool	What it does
JSON Formatter	Beautify, minify, sort keys, escape as a string literal and pinpoint syntax errors by line and column.
SQL Formatter	Clause-aware pretty printing with optional keyword uppercasing.
XML Formatter	Validation, pretty printing, minification and a structure summary.

🎲 Generators

Tool	What it does
Hash / Checksum	MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256/384/512 and CRC-32, with optional HMAC and hex/Base64 output.
Lorem Ipsum	Paragraphs, sentences and words with optional `<p>` wrapping.
Password Generator	Cryptographically strong passwords with entropy and strength feedback.
UUID Generator	RFC 4122 v4, time-ordered v7 and nil UUIDs in bulk.
ULID Generator	Sortable ULIDs with a decoded timestamp.
RSA Key Generator	2048/3072/4096-bit key pairs in PKCS#8 and SPKI PEM.
Semver Calculator	Version comparison, range checks and the next patch/minor/major releases.

🎨 Graphic & Color

Tool	What it does
Color Tools	HEX/RGB/HSL/CMYK conversions, WCAG contrast checks, tints, shades and a click-to-copy palette.
Color Blind Simulator	Previews images or colors through seven color-vision deficiencies.
Image Converter	PNG, JPEG and WebP conversion with resizing and quality control.

🧪 Testers

Tool	What it does
JSONPath Tester	Runs JSONPath expressions and lists matches with types and values.
Regular Expression Tester	Live highlighting, groups and named groups, replacement preview and a cheat sheet.
XML / XSD Validator	Well-formedness checks plus a structural comparison against an XSD schema.

⭐ Icons

Tool	What it does
Icon Browser	Searchable set of 95 Tabler-style outline icons; click any icon to copy its SVG.

📦 Extras

Tool	What it does
Duplicate Detector	Finds repeated lines or values with counts and positions.
File Splitter	Splits any file into equal parts or by size and downloads each chunk.
JSON Schema Generator	Infers a draft 2020-12 JSON Schema from a sample document.
PNG Compressor	Reduces PNG size by downscaling and re-encoding.
Randomizer	Random numbers, dice, coin flips, list shuffling and prize draws.
RESX Translator	Loads `.resx` files, edits translations in place and exports a new file.
Text Delimiter	Parses CSV/TSV-style text into columns, transposes it and re-joins with another delimiter.
XSD Generator	Builds an XSD schema from an XML sample with inferred data types.

⚙️ Settings

Setting	Default	Description
`devTools.language`	`auto`	Interface language: `auto`, `en` or `ru`. `auto` follows the VS Code display language.
`devTools.startupTool`	empty	Tool identifier opened by default, for example `converters-json-yaml`. Leave empty to restore the last used tool.
`devTools.showStatusBar`	`true`	Show the Dev Tools button in the status bar.

⌨️ Commands

Command	Keybinding
Dev Tools: Open Dev Tools (`devTools.open`)	`Ctrl+Alt+D` / `Cmd+Alt+D`
Dev Tools: Open a specific tool (`devTools.openTool`)	—

🔒 Privacy

Dev Tools works entirely offline. It does not collect telemetry, does not send data anywhere, and does not read your workspace files unless you explicitly drop a file into a tool.

🛠️ Development

The whole project is written in TypeScript 7 and runs directly on Node's type stripping.

npm install
npm run compile     # development build with source maps
npm run watch       # incremental build
npm run catalog     # regenerate src/catalog.ts from the tool registry
npm run typecheck   # tsc --noEmit
npm run package     # production build + dev-tools-vscode-1.0.0.vsix (alias: npm run vsix)

Press F5 to launch an Extension Development Host.

To iterate on the UI without restarting VS Code, serve the repository and open the preview harness:

npm run preview
# http://127.0.0.1:8765/dev/preview.html

The preview uses the same bundle and falls back to localStorage instead of the VS Code API, so everything except the four host-side tools works there.

src/extension.ts      activation, commands, status bar item
src/sidebar.ts        Activity Bar launcher (native tree)
src/catalog.ts        generated tool catalog used by the launcher
src/panel.ts          webview panel lifecycle
src/rpc.ts            Node-side handlers (hash, gzip, certificate, RSA)
src/webview/          webview application (shell, tools, design system)
media/                HTML template, stylesheet, icons

Dev Tools Toolbox

Dmitry Sorokin