Inflate
Faithful Android layout & drawable XML previews in VS Code — powered by layoutlib, no Android
Studio required.
Inflate renders your real Android XML — layouts, drawables, colors, nine-patches — the same way
Android's own rendering engine (layoutlib) does, right inside VS Code. It works on native Gradle
Android projects and .NET (Xamarin/MAUI) Android projects, because it drives the same engine off
the XML/resource-tree conventions both ecosystems share, not off either build system.
- No Android Studio. No Android SDK. No Gradle or MSBuild invocation, ever.
- Faithful. Real inflation, measure, and draw via the same
layoutlib Android Studio itself
uses — not an approximation.
- Both ecosystems, day one.
res/layout/*.xml (Gradle) and Resources/layout/*.axml (.NET)
are both first-class.
- Light/dark, device, density, orientation. Preview any configuration combination from the
toolbar — no manifest edits. Drag the preview's edges to try arbitrary sizes.
- Drawable states. Inspect selectors in any state (pressed, checked, disabled, …) against a
checkerboard stage.
Requirements
- macOS (v1 is macOS-only; Apple Silicon is the primary tested platform, Intel Macs are
supported best-effort).
- VS Code 1.90+.
- A JDK 17 or newer on your machine (Android Studio's bundled JBR, Microsoft OpenJDK,
Homebrew/SDKMAN
openjdk, or any standard JDK install all work). Inflate finds it automatically —
it never downloads or manages a JVM itself. If none is found, a guided setup message walks you
through it.
First run
The first time you preview anything, Inflate makes a one-time download of the pinned rendering
engine (layoutlib + the bundled androidx/Material libraries) from Google's Maven repository —
about 170 MB, shown with progress in the preview panel. This happens once per engine version;
after that previews keep working fully offline.
Quickstart
- Open any file under
res/layout/, res/drawable/, Resources/layout/, or
Resources/drawable/ (.xml or .axml).
- Click the preview icon in the editor title bar (or right-click → Inflate: Open Preview).
- Edit and save — the preview updates in place, without stealing focus from your editor.
- Use the toolbar to flip day/night, change device/density/orientation, pick a drawable state —
or drag the preview's edges to resize the render canvas.
Commands
| Command |
What it does |
Inflate: Open Preview |
Opens (or reveals) the preview panel for the active/selected XML file. |
Inflate: Refresh Preview |
Re-renders the active preview from the editor's current (possibly unsaved) buffer. |
Inflate: Doctor |
Reports detected JDK, engine cache state, host status, resolved resource roots, and the last render's timings — the first thing to check when something looks wrong. |
Inflate: Clear Engine Cache |
Deletes the cached engine artifacts (forces a fresh download + verification next time a preview is opened). |
Inflate: Restart Render Host |
Manually restarts the render host process (needed after repeated crashes trip the auto-restart limit). |
Settings
| Setting |
Default |
What it controls |
inflate.javaHome |
(unset) |
Absolute path to a JDK install, overriding auto-detection (JAVA_HOME > PATH > platform-standard locations). |
inflate.resourceRoots |
[] |
Extra resource-root directories to merge in, for project layouts the automatic module/source-set discovery doesn't find (multi-module or unconventional layouts). |
inflate.hostMaxHeap |
1024 (MB) |
The render host JVM's -Xmx. Raise this if Doctor or a crash message reports an OutOfMemoryError. |
inflate.renderTimeoutMs |
15000 |
How long a single render may run before Inflate kills and restarts the host, treating it as a crash. |
What's rendered faithfully, and what isn't (yet)
Inflate aims to be complete across framework views/widgets, the bundled androidx/Material surface,
and every drawable type — but it is not 100% pixel-identical to Android Studio in every case. Read
docs/limitations.md before
relying on a pixel-perfect render — it documents every known divergence (a handful of Material
widgets, custom views, data binding, version pinning) plainly.
Troubleshooting
Run Inflate: Doctor first — it reports the detected JDK, engine cache, host status, and last
render timings. Then see
docs/troubleshooting.md
for no-JDK, offline/download-failure, and host-crash walkthroughs.
Privacy
No telemetry. The only network traffic Inflate ever makes is the one-time pinned engine download
from dl.google.com (Google's own Maven repository), verified against pinned SHA-256 checksums.
Your project files never leave your machine — the render host runs with no project bytecode loaded.
Contributing & license
Source, issues, and contribution guide live at
github.com/ionixjunior/inflate —
bugs and feature requests go to the
issue tracker.
Licensed under the
Apache License 2.0.
