SmartNotes

Attach persistent Markdown notes to any section of code. Notes render as hover tooltips, stay anchored as code changes, and render images inline.

Features

Hover tooltips & inline images

Notes render as rich Markdown directly on the annotated line. Local images are inlined as data: URIs to bypass VS Code's hover CSP — something no other note extension does.

LineNote vs SmartNotes — image rendering in hover

Position tracking

Notes stay anchored as code changes. Delta tracking keeps them accurate during a live session; on every file open, anchor text is matched against actual file content so notes survive git pull, cold restarts, and external edits. Fuzzy matching ignores trailing comments and whitespace changes.

LineNote vs Bookmarks vs SmartNotes — position tracking after file changes

Sidebar panel & gutter menu

Browse all notes grouped by file in a dedicated activity bar panel. Right-click any section to add, open, or remove notes, or use Ctrl+Alt+N to add a note from the keyboard.

SmartNotes sidebar panel and context-aware gutter menu

Storage

Notes live in .vscode/smartnotes/, mirroring the source tree:

.vscode/smartnotes/
  src/
    extension.ts/
      L6 - - Hover tooltips — notes render as rich.md        ← single-line note
      L9-L17 - let noteStore NoteStore  undefined;.md        ← range note

Each .md file is pure Markdown — open it in any editor. Commit the folder to share notes with your team, or add it to .gitignore to keep them local.

Future Work

• MCP server — expose notes as tools (get_note, add_note, update_note, delete_note, search_notes) so AI agents can read and write notes directly from chat, and perform AI-assisted re-anchoring after large refactors