String Utility Belt for VS Code

Run String Utility Belt's string transforms — encoding, hashing, ciphers, formatting, generators and more — directly on your editor selection, or replay a whole saved pipeline, without leaving VS Code. Same engine and utilities as the web app.

Features

Transform Selection… (subelt.transform, Ctrl+Alt+U / Cmd+Alt+U)

Pick a utility from a searchable list (name, category and description are all matched; recently used ones come first), choose whether to use its default parameters or customize them, and it runs on every selection in the active editor, replaced in a single undoable edit.

• Selections: every non-empty selection is transformed. When there is no selection at all (only cursors), the whole document is transformed.
• Parameters: choices are picked from a list (the default is marked), yes/no switches from Yes/No, and numbers, text, regexes, colors and dates are typed into a prefilled box that validates as you type, with the same rules as the web app. A cleared number box means "use the default". A default containing a line break or tab is shown as \n / \t; accepting it unchanged keeps the real character. Key/value, multi-select and file parameters keep their defaults.
• Results: raw bytes are inserted as base64 (with a notice); JSON is inserted pretty-printed.
• Errors name the utility and leave the document untouched. If you edit the document while a slow transform is running, its result is discarded rather than pasted over your changes.
• Only utilities that can run in VS Code's Node-based extension host are offered — not those that need a browser DOM, the browser main thread, or eval.

Repeat Last Transform (subelt.repeatLast)

Reruns the last successful transform, with the same parameters, on the current selection(s).

Run Pipeline (share link or JSON)… (subelt.runPipeline)

Runs a full saved pipeline (branches, macros, conditions and error policies included) over each selection. The pipeline can come from:

• a pasted share URL (…#/p/<payload> or …#/embed/<payload>) or the bare payload, or
• a .json file — a single pipeline document, or a String Utility Belt library export ({ entries: [...] }), in which case you pick which saved pipeline to run.

Pipelines from links and files are untrusted: their steps are sanitized, and a pipeline that uses a utility VS Code can't run — browser-only ones, custom JavaScript (custom_js), or an unknown utility id — is refused with the list of offending utilities, rather than run partially. If a step set to "stop on error" fails, nothing is replaced; other step failures follow their error policy and are reported in a warning.

Describe Utility… (subelt.describe)

Opens an untitled markdown document describing any utility: its parameters (labels, defaults, options and limits), tags, aliases and worked examples. Browser-only utilities are listed too, marked as such.

Building and packaging

The extension is bundled with Vite into one self-contained CommonJS file — every dependency except vscode itself is inlined, so no node_modules ship. From the repo root:

npm run build:vscode   # -> packages/vscode/dist/extension.cjs

To produce an installable .vsix, package it with vsce (not a dependency of this repo — npx downloads it on demand):

cd packages/vscode
npx @vscode/vsce package --no-dependencies

vsce reads package.json and .vscodeignore (an allowlist: only dist/extension.cjs, its source map, package.json, README.md and CHANGELOG.md ship). It asks for confirmation when there is no LICENSE file or repository field in this directory — add them before publishing. Build first: there is no vscode:prepublish script.

Development

npm run build:vscode                                                      # build dist/extension.cjs
npx vitest run packages/vscode/src --minWorkers=1 --maxWorkers=2          # unit tests
npx tsc --noEmit -p packages/vscode/tsconfig.json                         # typecheck

The commands live in src/commands.ts and receive the vscode API as a parameter (src/extension.ts is the thin entry that passes the real module in), so the tests drive them with a small fake (src/test-helpers/fake-vscode.ts) and run under the repo's root Vitest config as well as packages/vscode/vitest.config.ts. src/dist-load.test.ts loads the built bundle with vscode stubbed and runs a pipeline through it; it is skipped until npm run build:vscode has been run.

To try it in a real Extension Development Host, open this folder in VS Code and launch it with extensionDevelopmentPath pointing here, or install the packaged .vsix via "Extensions: Install from VSIX…".