In a nutshell

Place inactive cursors and selections

And activate them on demand

Everything is done with two commands

• Place inactive cursors and selections with KCS: Place Inactive Selection command.

• Inactive cursors and selections are activated with KCS: Activate Selections command.

• By default the commands are mapped to PageDown and PageUp respectively. If you need help in remapping them, check below.

Read more

Feedback

For questions, suggestions, issues, feel free to use the Issues section of the extension's repository.

If you want to remap the commands

1. Open the Command Palette (Windows/Linux: Ctrl + Shift + P, Mac: Cmd + Shift + P).

2. Search for and select Preferences: Open Keyboard Shortcuts.

3. Once the Shortcuts tab is open, search for the desired command, for example Place Inactive Selection, double click on it and press the new key combination.

Other features

• Placing multiple inactive cusors and selections at once is also supported

  

• To remove all inactive cursors and selections, simply press Esc

• If you place an inactive cursor or selection over another, the existing one will be removed

  

• Undo-Redo system

  It registers all actions that have as effect placing or removing inactive cursors and selections. These can be undone or redone via two commands:

  • KCS: Undo

    Default mapping: Windows/Linux: alt + shift + z, Mac: option + shift + z.

  • KCS: Redo

    Default mapping: Windows/Linux: alt + shift + y, Mac: option + shift + y.

  

• Experimental: Inactive cursors and selections react to document edits

  When you make edits to the document, the inacitve cursors and selections will move across the document in accordance with those edits.

  

  This feature is also integrated with the Undo-Redo system, meaning that the undone or redone inactive cursors and selections will respect the new document edits.

  

  

  By default this feature is enabled. If you wish to disable this, it is found in VS Code Settings under the name Kcs: Inactive Selections React To Document Edits.

  Please report any issues you have about this experimental feature.

• You can change the colors of the inactive cursors and selections

  1. Open the Command Palette (Windows/Linux: Ctrl+Shift+P, Mac: Cmd+Shift+P).

  2. Search for and select Preferences: Open Settingts (UI).

  3. Once the settings view is open, type "kcs" and options like Kcs: Cursor Color and Kcs: Selection Color will appear. Their value has to be given in hex code.

  
  
  • For developers who want to change these colors through their theme, this is an example of how you could do it:

    const configuration = vscode.workspace.getConfiguration('kcs')
    await configuration.update('cursorColor', '#ff0000', vscode.ConfigurationTarget.Global)
    await configuration.update('selectionColor', '#ff000099', vscode.ConfigurationTarget.Global)
    

    Note that you can use transparency, especially for the selection color.

Extension limitations

These extension's limitations are derived from the limitations of the VS Code Extension API itself, but they are handled to minimize as much as possible their inconvenience.

• Inactive selections visuals

• Uniquely identify editors with the same file