Line Save Tracker

See what you changed since opening a file, and whether you saved it.

Line Save Tracker brings Visual Studio style edit markers to VS Code. An orange mark shows a change that has not been saved yet. Save the file and it turns green. Edit that line again and it turns orange. The marks appear at the left edge of the editor text and in the overview ruler beside the scrollbar, so edits are easy to find in a long file.

It tracks your editing session, independently of Git. This is useful when you want to find the lines you touched today, even in a file outside a repository or in a project with many changes since the last commit.

How it works

Inserted, modified, and deleted lines are tracked. For a deleted line, the marker appears at the nearest surviving line. Manually restoring the original text still counts as an edit. Undo restores the previous markers; saving turns orange markers green.

For multi-line replacements from AI tools, formatters, or paste operations, the extension compares the old and new lines. Unchanged lines keep their existing markers instead of the entire replacement range turning orange. Whitespace changes within a line still count; changing line endings alone does not mark every line.

Install

Search for Line Save Tracker in VS Code's Extensions view and select Install. For a local VSIX, open Extensions → … → Install from VSIX… and select the package. Reload the window when prompted, then open a text file.

If you use another change-marker extension, disable its overlapping markers to make the colors easy to distinguish.

Settings

For example, in settings.json:

{
  "lineSaveTracker.savedColor": "#49A65A",
  "lineSaveTracker.unsavedColor": "#E7A13A"
}

Reload the VS Code window after changing either color.

Scope and current limitations

• Tracks regular local text files during the current open session. Closing the file clears its markers; no source code or edit history is uploaded.
• If the extension starts while a file is already open, the content at startup becomes its starting point. Reopen the file to start from a fresh baseline.
• For large, heavily rewritten blocks, bounded line matching can mark some surrounding lines as part of the changed block.
• The narrow line marker sits beside the editor text, leaving the breakpoint gutter free. It is slightly farther right than a gutter icon.

中文说明

Line Save Tracker 在 VS Code 的代码区左边缘和右侧滚动条显示本次打开文件后的修改： 橙色表示尚未保存，保存后变成绿色；再次修改同一行则重新变橙色。 手动把文字改回原样仍算编辑，使用撤销则恢复编辑前的标记状态。 AI、格式化工具等一次替换多行时，只标记实际变化的行，未变化的行保留原有标记。 行内空格、缩进变化仍算修改；仅转换换行符不会把整份文件标记。 关闭文件后清除标记，重新打开时开始新的一轮跟踪。标记位于断点区域右侧， 左侧断点区域保持可用。 它不依赖 Git，普通本地文本文件也能使用。

在 VS Code 扩展页面搜索 Line Save Tracker 安装。安装本地 VSIX 时， 点击扩展页面右上角 … → Install from VSIX… 并选择安装包。 如果有其他显示修改行的扩展，建议先禁用其重叠的标记。

Development

The extension uses the VS Code extension API and Node.js without runtime dependencies. Run node test.js to check session marker behavior and python3 package_vsix.py to build a local VSIX.

License: MIT.