Code Merge

Select files, folders, or code snippets and merge them into a single markdown preview — with a project tree and per-file headers. Perfect for feeding context to LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot) or sharing code snapshots with your team.

✨ Features

• 📁 Add files — right-click any file in the Explorer, or use the keyboard.
• 📂 Add folders — recursively scan a folder with smart ignore rules (node_modules, .git, dist, .venv, binaries, lockfiles, …). Symlinks are skipped, so cyclic links never hang the scan.
• ✂️ Add selections — grab a range of lines from the current editor (supports multi-cursor with Ctrl+D).
• 🌲 Project tree — every merged output starts with an ASCII tree of the selected items, including line ranges for selections.
• 🪟 Virtual preview — the merged output is a live, in-memory document. Nothing is written to your workspace; the preview updates as you add, remove, or edit items.
• 🔄 Live sync — edits (including unsaved ones) and external changes (git pull, other editors) are picked up automatically. Files that are deleted or that exceed 5 MB are dropped from the list.
• 📋 One-click copy — copy the entire merged content to the clipboard.
• 🔒 Workspace isolation — each workspace folder gets its own item list. The preview follows the active workspace as you switch between multi-root folders.
• 💾 Session-only state — the selection list lives entirely in memory and resets when VS Code restarts. No disk writes, no state to clean up.

🚀 Usage

Adding items

Viewing & exporting

Open the Code Merge view from the Activity Bar to see all selected items. From there you can:

• Preview ($(open-preview)) — opens the merged output as a read-only virtual document beside the current editor.
• Copy ($(copy)) — copies the full merged output to the clipboard.
• Clear ($(clear-all)) — removes every item for the current workspace.

Clicking any item in the tree opens its source file. For selections, the file opens scrolled to and highlighting the recorded range.

Example output

// ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
// Project structure — my-api
// ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

my-api/
├── src/
│   ├── index.ts  [full]
│   ├── routes/
│   │   └── auth.ts  [L10-L25, L40-L50]
│   └── db.ts  [full]
└── README.md  [full]

// ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
// src/index.ts (typescript) — file
// ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
import express from 'express';
...

// ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
// src/routes/auth.ts [L10-L25] (typescript) — selection
// ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
export function login(req, res) {
  ...
}

⌨️ Keyboard shortcuts

All shortcuts can be rebound from Keyboard Shortcuts (Ctrl+K Ctrl+S).

⚙️ Configuration

No settings yet. Ignore rules are built-in and cover:

• Directories — node_modules, .git, dist, build, out, coverage, target, .venv, __pycache__, .next, .cache, … (.github, .gitlab, and .devcontainer are not ignored so CI configs can be merged.)
• Extensions — images, audio/video, archives, binaries, fonts, documents, databases, logs.
• Filenames — package-lock.json, yarn.lock, pnpm-lock.yaml, Cargo.lock, .env, .env.*, etc.
• Size — files (and selections) larger than 5 MB are skipped automatically.
• Symlinks — skipped during folder scans to avoid cycles and duplicate content.

📋 Requirements

• VS Code 1.85.0 or newer.
• No external dependencies.