Renders a file's ANSI escape sequences in a WebView panel with line numbers and Ctrl+F find, auto-opens .log/.ansi/.ans files in it, and provides title-bar buttons to toggle line wrap and switch between the rendered view and the editable text. Scales to large files by relying on the browser's HTML r
Installation
Launch VS Code Quick Open (Ctrl+P), paste the following command, and press enter.
Renders a file's ANSI escape sequences — the colors and styles your
build tools and loggers emit — in a WebView panel, with line numbers
and native Ctrl+F find. .log, .ansi and .ans files open in it
automatically.
Why another ANSI viewer
Large files. Extensions that colorize via VS Code's per-byte
text-decoration API stall on multi-megabyte logs; this one hands the
whole file to the browser engine as HTML spans, which is what browsers
are good at. Multi-MB logs render fine.
What you get
The 16-color SGR palette (basic + bright, foreground and
background), plus bold, italic and underline. Styling state carries
across lines, like a real terminal.
Line numbers that stay out of your way — drawn as CSS counters,
so they never appear in Ctrl+F results or copied text, and the
number column stays pinned during horizontal scroll.
Title-bar buttons on the viewer: toggle line wrap (wrapped rows
get a hanging indent past the number gutter), and Edit as Text to
flip to the ordinary editor. On a .log/.ansi/.ans text editor,
an eye button flips back to the viewer. One panel per file — the
toggle reuses the tab instead of spawning duplicates. The View/Edit
toggle is deliberately the RIGHTMOST title-bar action in both modes,
so it sits in the same screen position either way and you can
click-toggle without moving the mouse.
A stats strip at the top: SGR sequence count, line count, size.
Markdown, too
The same view/edit convention is applied to Markdown: .md files
auto-open in VS Code's built-in preview, with title-bar buttons to
flip between preview and source. If you prefer VS Code's default
Markdown behavior, this is the extension's most opinionated feature —
feedback welcome.
Notes and limits
256-color (38;5;n) and truecolor (38;2;r;g;b) sequences are not
interpreted yet — only the classic 16-color codes.
The panel is static HTML with no scripts (CSP default-src 'none').
Editing a file the viewer has open: use Edit as Text; the file
stays editable until you explicitly reopen it in the viewer.
