⇄ RTL Agents

A professional VS Code extension that enables robust Right-to-Left (RTL) support for AI Chat interfaces (including Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf, VSCodium, and Antigravity) while keeping code blocks, tables, and system UI elements properly aligned in Left-to-Right (LTR).

Specifically optimized for Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew languages.

✨ Key Features

• 🌐 Multi-IDE Support: Automatically detects and patches every workbench document of the running IDE — VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, VSCodium, and Antigravity (including Antigravity's separate agent window).
• ⚡ Native Bidirectional (BiDi) Alignment: Direction is resolved by the browser itself, per paragraph, from the first strong directional character — unicode-bidi: plaintext. A Persian paragraph goes right, an English one stays left, inside the same reply.
• ✨ Zero Flicker While Streaming: Because alignment is pure CSS, it is applied at layout time, before the first paint. Streamed text never renders LTR and then jumps. There is no per-word JavaScript, no document-wide MutationObserver, and no measurable CPU cost while a reply is generating.
• 🛡️ Code Block & Layout Safety: pre, code, Monaco editors, and table column order stay LTR, so your coding workspace and any code inside a Persian sentence remain readable.
• ⇄ Seamless Header Integration: Places a toggle button (⇄) directly inside the chat panel header, next to the "New Chat" button, borrowing its styling. The status bar item and the header button always agree.
• 💾 Persistency: Remembers your preference across reloads, and keeps every patched window in sync instantly.
• 🔑 Checksum Bypass: Removes the relevant workbench checksum keys from product.json to prevent the [Unsupported] / "Installation is corrupt" warning, restoring them exactly on deactivation.
• ♻️ Clean Uninstall: Deactivating removes the toggle button immediately, and restores every patched file byte for byte. A backup left over from an older IDE build is never written over a newer one.
• 🔄 Auto-Reactivation: Detects editor updates and re-applies the patch, prompting for a restart.

🚀 Getting Started

Because this extension modifies the workbench UI elements on disk to enable deep integration, it requires a simple, one-time activation.

1. Open the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P on Windows/Linux or Cmd+Shift+P on macOS).
2. Type and run: RTL Agents: Activate RTL.
3. Fully quit and restart your IDE (doing a simple "Reload Window" is not enough).
4. Open your AI Chat and enjoy proper RTL alignment!

[!TIP] Permission Denied on macOS/Linux? This is normal since editor files on disk are write-protected. Running the command will output a copyable shell fix command (e.g., sudo chown ...). Copy it, run it in your Terminal, then run RTL Agents: Activate RTL again.

⚙️ Configuration

You can customize the extension via your settings.json:

{
  "rtl-agents.customSelectors": [
    ".my-custom-chat-panel",
    "div[class*=\"custom-message-list\"]"
  ]
}

• rtl-agents.customSelectors: Additional chat container selectors. Text inside them picks its own direction per paragraph, exactly like the built-in containers. Changing this rewrites the injected stylesheet right away — no re-patch needed.

[!NOTE] rtl-agents.rtlCharacterRegex is deprecated as of v2.0.0 and ignored. Direction is now resolved natively by the browser, so there is no character list to configure.

🛠️ Commands

🧪 Development

pnpm install
pnpm build   # bundle the extension
pnpm test    # patch/unpatch round-trip and asset generation checks
pnpm lint

pnpm test exercises the patch layer against synthetic fixtures in a temp directory — it never touches a real IDE installation.

📄 License

MIT © Foshati