Rosella for VS Code and Cursor

Read your code as sentences, without leaving the editor. Deterministic and offline: no network calls, no model calls, no telemetry.

Read mode: parse.ts beside a panel of sentences

Trying it locally

From the repository root:

pnpm install
pnpm build

Then open the repository in VS Code and press F5 — or pick Run and Debug → Rosella: Extension Development Host. A second window opens with the extension loaded and packages/vscode/sample/ as its workspace. In it:

File	What to try
`checkout.ts`	Read mode; click a chip; the `checkout` annotation is deliberately stale
`package.json`	Read mode on a config file
`Dockerfile`	The instruction pack, and a continued `RUN`
`.github/workflows/ci.yml`	The cron schedule, read as words

The second launch configuration opens Rosella on this repository instead, which is a better test of how it reads real code.

pnpm --filter rosella-vscode watch rebuilds on save; reload the development window (Cmd/Ctrl+R) to pick the rebuild up.

To install it into your everyday VS Code instead:

pnpm --filter rosella-vscode package     # writes rosella-vscode-0.2.0.vsix
code --install-extension packages/vscode/rosella-vscode-0.2.0.vsix

Views

Read — a panel of sentences beside the editor. Click one to peek its source; click a chip to change the literal it stands for.
Hybrid — sentences as marginalia in the ordinary editor, with a ❧ in the gutter.
Flow — the control flow graph of one function; click a node to jump to it.

Press the rosella head in the editor title bar, or run Rosella: Switch View Mode.

Hybrid — the sentence sits at end of line, and hovering one shows where every word came from:

Hybrid mode: marginalia at end of line, with a provenance hover

Flow — pick a function from the dropdown and read its branches:

Flow mode: the control flow graph of splitPairs

Chips

Boolean, number and string literals render as editable chips. Clicking a boolean flips it; clicking a number or string asks for the new value. Edits go through a WorkspaceEdit and replace exactly the literal they are bound to — Rosella never parses English back into code.

Staleness

An annotation whose code has moved is marked rather than repeated confidently. Invalid annotations become errors with quick fixes; unverified ones render dimmed.

Settings

Setting
`rosella.defaultView`	`read`, `flow`, `hybrid` or `code`
`rosella.depthLimit`	expression nesting before subtrees collapse (default 2)
`rosella.sidecarFilename`	vocabulary file to look for (default `.rosella.yml`)
`rosella.useDocComments`	fall back to doc comment first sentences
`rosella.useIdentifierSplitting`	fall back to splitting identifiers
`rosella.chips`	render editable literals

A note on Hybrid mode

Marginalia sits at end of line rather than beneath the statement. The stable decoration API cannot insert a rendered line between two lines of a document, and Rosella will not edit your buffer in order to display something. Read mode is how you see sentences on their own lines. See D9.

Apache-2.0.

Rosella — code, made readable

Rosella Dev