DynaSense (LS-DYNA Studio)

Dedicated LS-DYNA Keyword Deck Editor for VS Code

LS-DYNA (.k) deck editing assistant, with quick keyword and manual lookup.

English Version | 中文说明 | Product website

DynaSense overview: project tools, editor with field help, Keyword Manager and English manual

Quick Start

3-Step Setup

Install Extension: Search for DynaSense in the VS Code Marketplace and install it.
Open a Model Deck: Open any .k, .key, or .dyna file (main deck or included file).
Start Productive Editing:
- Type * to insert keywords with pre-formatted cards;
- Hover over fields to view parameter definitions;
- Scan model relationships directly from LS-DYNA Project Tools in the activity bar.

Field help in the editor

Key Shortcuts

Shortcut	Action	Description
Tab / Shift+Tab	Jump fields	Navigate through card fields like Excel cells
Delete / Backspace	Clean without shifting	Clears a selected supported field with spaces, preserving subsequent columns
`$` or `$#`	Insert header	Instantly generate aligned comment headers for field names
Ctrl + /	Toggle comment	Quick toggle for LS-DYNA `$` comment lines
Ctrl + Alt + Up/Down	Jump keyword	Move directly to the previous / next keyword
F2	Rename parameter	Rename &param across the current document

After scanning the main deck in the Include Tree, type & in a supported numeric field to complete parameters. Use Go to Definition, Peek Definition and Find References to navigate parameter usage across included files.

Key Features

1. Fixed-Width Card Editing: Excel-like Editing with Misalignment Protection

When editing .k files in ordinary text editors, an accidental keystroke or deletion often shifts subsequent numbers, causing syntax errors during solver submission.

DynaSense provides built-in column width protection:

Smart Navigation: Press Tab to navigate through fixed-width fields. Typing replaces fields selected through Tab; typing * or $ retains normal editing behavior.
Misalignment Protection: Pressing Delete or Backspace clears the selected field and pads with spaces so subsequent columns stay perfectly in place.
Keyword Manager: Open the card manager from keyword hover actions to preview and inspect field modifications before saving them back to the deck.

Keyword Manager: inspect material card fields

2. Instant Manual Help & Curve Previews: No More Flipping Through PDFs

Hover Manual Assistance: Hover over supported keywords or fields to see parameter descriptions and engineering significance.
Graphical Curve Previews: Hover over load curve fields (such as LCID referencing *DEFINE_CURVE) to render curve plots and supported table previews directly inside VS Code.
Side-by-Side Manual Reader: Read local official manuals side-by-side with your deck files.

Modern simulation models often contain dozens or hundreds of *INCLUDE files:

Hierarchical Tree View: Scan the main deck to inspect the detected include hierarchy in the sidebar. Double-click to jump directly to any sub-file.
Cross-File Parameter Resolution: Automatically respects *INCLUDE_PATH and evaluates parameters across included decks.

Found and missing include paths

Local Manual Setup

Official PDF manuals can be viewed locally offline:

Manual Pack	Download
Bilingual	Download lsdyna-manual-pack-bilingual.zip
English	Download lsdyna-manual-pack-en.zip

Manual packs updated: 2026-10-18.

Official documentation: The Ansys LS-DYNA manuals download page provides the official original documents. The ZIP files above are local manual packs for use with the extension.

Chinese and bilingual reading require a manual pack containing translations; changing the UI language does not add translations to the English pack. In-editor help and translations are reading aids; use the official PDF as the technical reference.

Setup Steps:

Download and extract the manual pack to a local folder (e.g. D:\LS-DYNA\Manuals).
Press Ctrl + Shift + P in VS Code, run Set LS-DYNA Manuals Directory.
Choose Select folder, then select the extracted root folder containing manifest.json.
Run LS-DYNA: Open Manual Reader or click the Manuals view in the activity bar.

Tip for Windows: Place SumatraPDF.exe in the manual pack folder or its pdf subfolder to jump directly to specific pages in the official PDF.

Settings

Most features work out of the box. Useful settings in VS Code Preferences (Ctrl + ,, search LS-DYNA):

lsdyna.manualsDir: Path to your local extracted manual pack folder.
lsdyna.language: UI display language (auto, zh-cn, or en).
lsdyna.enableCellEditProtect: Prevents column shifting on Delete/Backspace (enabled by default).
lsdyna.enableTabNavigation: Smart Tab jumping between fields (enabled by default).

All settings and defaults

The Settings editor now lists 29 options: 12 everyday options and 17 advanced options. Existing explicit values for the retired cache settings remain honored within their previous bounds; new profiles use the built-in defaults. VS Code may mark the retired JSON keys as unknown. Change marks now use a fixed 250 ms update delay. To silence setup notices, choose Do not remind me again in the notice; an existing lsdyna.health.showFirstRunNotice: false is still respected. The unaudited-catalog setting no longer enables unreviewed data; development use requires the existing environment-variable override.

The retired lsdyna.scanner.fullScanLargeFiles switch is no longer needed: keyword and include discovery already reads through the file, including the middle of large files. Existing values do not change this behavior. Cancellation, scan budgets and incomplete-result reporting still apply; this is not a guarantee of complete entity-reference analysis.

To clean up old settings, open Preferences: Open User Settings (JSON) and check workspace settings too. You may remove lsdyna.scanner.fullScanLargeFiles and lsdyna.changeMarks.debounceMs; they no longer control behavior. Keep an existing lsdyna.health.showFirstRunNotice: false if you still want to suppress notices. For retired cache limits, see the compatibility defaults and migration notes before deleting an override. The extension does not rewrite your settings.

Editing

Setting	Default	Description
`lsdyna.enableTabNavigation`	`true`	Enable smart Tab navigation and field overwrite selection in LS-DYNA cards. When disabled, Tab inserts spaces or tab characters normally.
`lsdyna.enableCellEditProtect`	`true`	With this enabled, Delete or Backspace clears a selected fixed-width field with spaces so later fields do not shift. Typing replaces the whole field only after Tab selects it; * and `$` always use standard text editing. This setting is independent of Tab navigation.
`lsdyna.enableFieldHover`	`true`	Show help when the pointer rests on a fixed-width card field. Turn this off to avoid field popups while editing; turn it back on from DynaSense quick actions.
`lsdyna.columnGuides.enabled`	`true`	Show column guides at verified fixed-width field boundaries.

Appearance

Setting	Default	Description
`lsdyna.changeMarks.enabled`	`true`	Show session change marks in the editor gutter. By default, amber marks are unsaved and green marks were saved after the file was opened. A solid bar means modified, a hollow bar means inserted, and a triangle marks a nearby deletion. Git is not required.
`lsdyna.changeMarks.colorScheme`	`"adaptive"`	Choose one color scheme for all session change marks. Every preset automatically adjusts for light, dark, high-contrast, and high-contrast-light themes.
`lsdyna.changeMarks.showLineBackground`	`true`	Apply a very light background to marked lines. Turn this off to keep only the gutter marks.
`lsdyna.statusBar.level`	`"simple"`	Amount of information about the current LS-DYNA file shown in the status bar. Off hides the entry; Simple shows problems or the current keyword; Detail also shows the field index and latest Include Tree scan root.
`lsdyna.codeLens.showOnAllKeywords`	`false`	Show Select Cards and Format actions above every LS-DYNA keyword. Keywords with optional suffixes also show Configure Options. When disabled, use the keyword hover actions, editor context menu, or Command Palette.
`lsdyna.navigation.pulseOnJump`	`true`	Highlight the target line briefly after jumping to a keyword usage.

Manuals and language

Setting	Default	Description
`lsdyna.manualsDir`	`"lsdyna_manual_pack"`	Root folder of a manual pack, containing its runtime indexes and PDF manuals. Use an absolute path or a path relative to the workspace. On Windows, place SumatraPDF.exe in the pack root or its pdf subfolder to enable precise page jumps.
`lsdyna.language`	`"auto"`	Choose the language for the extension’s runtime UI, hover help and messages. Command names and setting descriptions follow the VS Code display language.

Advanced: Engineering

Setting	Default	Description
`lsdyna.additionalExtensions`	`[".k",".key",".dyna"]`	Additional filename extensions to treat as LS-DYNA files.
`lsdyna.ignoreFormattingKeywords`	`[]`	Keywords or prefixes to exclude from the explicit LS-DYNA formatting command, smart Tab alignment, and field-comment completion.
`lsdyna.customValidKeywords`	`["END","TITLE","CASE_BEGIN","CASE_END"]`	Additional valid keywords that should not be reported as unknown. Include the leading asterisk (for example, '`END`'). Add a trailing wildcard (for example, '`MAT_*`') to match every keyword with that prefix. Entries can also be added from a hover or Quick Fix.
`lsdyna.unknownKeywordSeverity`	`"error"`	Diagnostic severity for keywords not found in the built-in library or custom valid list. This does not affect keywords beginning with ** or lowercase-keyword warnings.
`lsdyna.warnLowercaseKeyword`	`false`	Warn when a keyword contains lowercase letters (e.g. *node). LS-DYNA is case-insensitive, so this is off by default; enable it if your team keeps keywords uppercase.
`lsdyna.include.pathCaseCheck`	`"crossPlatform"`	How path casing is checked for `INCLUDE` and `INCLUDE_PATH`. Windows can open mismatched casing; Linux LS-DYNA usually cannot.
`lsdyna.autoFormat`	`"disabled"`	Experimental: choose when automatic LS-DYNA card formatting runs. Keep this disabled unless you are comfortable with edits when the cursor leaves a line.
`lsdyna.clearAutoIndentOnEnter`	`false`	Remove indentation copied by the editor after Enter in LS-DYNA files. Disabled by default to preserve intentional indentation and pasted text.

Advanced: Display and performance

Setting	Default	Description
`lsdyna.changeMarks.customUnsavedColor`	`"#e2a03a"`	Custom color for unsaved changes, in #RRGGBB format. Used only when Change Marks: Color Scheme is Custom.
`lsdyna.changeMarks.customSavedColor`	`"#89d185"`	Custom color for changes saved since the file was opened, in #RRGGBB format. Used only when Change Marks: Color Scheme is Custom.
`lsdyna.changeMarks.showOverviewRuler`	`true`	Also show change marks on the overview ruler (scrollbar).
`lsdyna.changeMarks.showMinimap`	`true`	Show unsaved and saved-since-open marks on the minimap using the selected color scheme. Modified, inserted, and deleted shapes remain in the editor gutter.
`lsdyna.changeMarks.maxLineCount`	`100000`	Skip change marks when a document has more lines than this (protects very large mesh decks).
`lsdyna.largeFile.enableRendering`	`true`	Keep syntax highlighting, hover help, and completion enabled for files of any length. Disable this to save memory when working with files above 100,000 lines. Explicit formatting has separate hard safety limits.
`lsdyna.hover.previewMaxLines`	`20`	Maximum number of lines to display in the `*INCLUDE` file hover preview.
`lsdyna.cache.entityIndexMemoryMaxMiB`	`"auto"`	Managed memory budget for model indexing in MiB, shared by query caches, unsaved document indexes, result pages, index build and restore batches and SQLite. This is not a limit on total VS Code process memory. Takes effect after the extension restarts.
`lsdyna.cache.entityIndexDiskMaxMiB`	`4096`	Shared disk budget for model indexes in MiB, including databases, journals and temporary build files. If the budget is exhausted, queries fall back to scanning. Takes effect after the extension restarts.

Community & Feedback

Feedback, suggestions, and contributions are welcome!

Issues & Discussions: Submit a GitHub Issue

Acknowledgments

This project is built upon the work of the open-source community. Special thanks to:

osullivryan/vscode-lsdyna: The original LS-DYNA extension for VS Code. Thanks to Ryan O'Sullivan (@osullivryan) and contributors @DCHartlen, @maxiiss, and @yshl for establishing the syntax highlighting and card editing foundations.
ansys/pydyna: Ansys's open-source library, which provides structured keyword card definitions and schemas.
vim-lsdyna: Created by @gradzikb, which provided reference for fixed-width column formatting.

DynaSense

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