UniNotepad Markdown Preview

Markdown preview with an interactive Mermaid layer — pan, zoom, and a switchable transparent/solid diagram backdrop — ported from the UniNotepad editor.

VS Code already ships a Markdown preview, so this extension is not trying to replace it. What it adds is the diagram-handling that UniNotepad built up: a zoom ladder that scales the document text and the diagrams together, click-and-drag panning inside an overflowing chart, a per-diagram backdrop you can dial in with RGBA sliders (useful when a light diagram is unreadable under a dark theme, or when you want to paste the diagram somewhere with a specific background), and a full-bleed layout for a standalone .mmd file that is one diagram.

Usage

Works on .md and on standalone .mmd / .mermaid files.

There is one preview panel and it follows the active editor, like the built-in one: switch to another Markdown file and the preview switches with you, scrolled back to the top. Editors it cannot render — a .ts file, an output channel, or the preview itself taking focus — leave the last render in place rather than blanking the pane.

This sits alongside VS Code's built-in Markdown preview rather than replacing it, so a .md file's title bar carries both buttons. The built-in one keeps the open-preview icon; this extension's is the app's own <> diamond — the only coloured glyph in that toolbar — and its tooltip reads Open Mermaid Preview to the Side.

Settings

Known gaps

These are real limitations of this version, not oversights:

• Fenced code blocks are not syntax-highlighted. UniNotepad highlights them by reusing CodeMirror's own grammars, which means one dynamic import per language — and a webview can only load resources through asWebviewUri, so a split bundle's chunk fetches are blocked by the Content-Security-Policy. Getting this back means swapping in a highlighter that fits a single bundle.
• No printing. VS Code webviews cannot call window.print() — the sandbox has no allow-modals. Export to HTML and print from a browser; the export command offers to open the file for you.
• #anchor links mostly miss. marked does not generate heading slugs by default, so there is usually no matching id to scroll to.
• Scroll sync is one-way (editor → preview), matching UniNotepad. Scrolling the preview does not move the editor.

Development

npm install
npm run typecheck   # both bundles: extension host and webview
npm run test        # build, then 50 assertions across both runtimes
npm run build       # dist/extension.js + dist/webview.js
npm run watch

Open vscode-ext/ as the workspace folder (not the repository root) and press F5; the launch configuration builds, starts an Extension Development Host, and opens sample/demo.md, which is a checklist for the things the tests cannot reach.

test/ runs both halves outside VS Code: extension-host.test.cjs drives dist/extension.js against a stub vscode module, and webview.test.cjs runs dist/webview.js in jsdom with a stubbed acquireVsCodeApi. The one thing neither covers is Mermaid's SVG output — mermaid measures text with getBBox, which jsdom does not implement, so a diagram deliberately lands in the error path there. Verify diagrams by eye via F5.

npm run package builds a .vsix. The publisher in package.json is ilphs, which must stay in sync with the Marketplace publisher the .vsix is uploaded under — a mismatch is rejected at upload time.

Layout

src/        extension host — commands, panel lifecycle, document sync
webview/    the preview itself — render core + Mermaid interaction layer
shared/     the message contract both sides import
media/      preview.css, icon.png (gallery icon), toolbar-icon-{light,dark}.svg

media/icon.png is a copy of the app's own icon (src-tauri/icons/128x128@2x.png, 256×256) so the extension is recognisable as part of UniNotepad. It is a copy for the same reason site/assets/app-icon.png is: each deliverable packages independently. Re-copy it if the app icon changes.

The two toolbar-icon-*.svg files are that same icon redrawn for a 16×16 title-bar slot: the black rounded square is dropped (at 16px it swallowed the whole glyph — invisible against a dark toolbar, a heavy black block against a light one) and only the <> diamond survives, keeping the app's cyan #51D7FF → violet #AE59EF gradient and its mirrored direction on the two strokes. The light variant is the same two hues at lower lightness, because the cyan end washes out on white. Re-derive them if the app icon's palette changes.

webview/mermaid-view.ts and webview/preview.ts are ports of the same files in UniNotepad's src/. They are copies, not a shared module: the app keys its state off a tab store and localStorage, the extension off a panel and workspace.getConfiguration. Fixes to the Mermaid layout and zoom rules generally apply to both and should be made in both.

License

MIT