RenderCV Preview

Live side-by-side preview for RenderCV YAML resumes in VS Code.

An unofficial, community-built extension. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the RenderCV project.

Open your CV's YAML file, click the preview icon in the editor title bar (or run RenderCV: Open Preview to the Side), and the rendered pages appear next to the editor. The preview re-renders a few hundred milliseconds after you stop typing — no need to save.

Features

• Debounced re-render while typing (or on save only, if you prefer)
• Page images update in place, so your scroll position survives edits
• Document-style zoom (100% = actual size) plus Fit mode, and one-click access to the rendered PDF
• HD toggle (on by default): 288 PPI preview for crisp text on Retina displays — turn it off if rendering feels sluggish
• Friendly error pane showing RenderCV's validation messages
• Renders into a temp folder — your project's rendercv_output/ is untouched

Requirements

The rendercv CLI (v2.x) must be installed, e.g.:

uv tool install rendercv

If it isn't on VS Code's PATH, set rendercvPreview.rendercvPath (~/.local/bin/rendercv is tried automatically).

Why not just rendercv render --watch?

RenderCV's documented VS Code setup pairs a --watch process with a PDF viewer extension, which works well. This extension differs in three ways:

• No global auto-save. The documented flow needs files.autoSave at a 10 ms delay to feel live, which fires every other tool's on-save hooks in every project. This renders from the unsaved buffer instead.
• Errors are visible. With --watch, a validation error prints to a terminal while the PDF pane silently keeps showing the last good render. Here the message appears over the preview.
• No terminal to babysit, and your rendercv_output/ is left alone.

Nice to have

The YAML extension by Red Hat pairs well with this preview: RenderCV files carry a # yaml-language-server: $schema=... header, so with that extension installed you get autocompletion and inline schema validation while typing. Not required — the preview works fine without it.

Settings

Credits

The extension icon incorporates the RenderCV mark from rendercv/rendercv (MIT).

License

MIT — see LICENSE.