Updated: April 24, 2020

The Custom Text Editor API has shipped with VS Code 1.44! Checkout the documentation and example extension to get started creating your custom text editors.

If you encounter any issues using CustomTextEditorProvider, please open a new issue.

This issue now tracks custom editors for binary files, which we aim to finalize for VS Code 1.46

• Most recent status update

Overview

The custom editor API aims to allow extensions to create fully customizable read/write editors that are used in place of VS Code's standard text editor for specific resources. These editors will be based on webviews. We will support editors for both binary and text resources

A XAML custom editor, for example, could show a WYSIWYG style editor for your .xaml files. Our end goal is to give extensions the most flexibility possible while keeping VS Code fast, lean, and consistent.

Non-goals

Many features that are potentially related to custom editors are out of scope of this current proposal, including:

• Specifying how resources are persisted and how resources are synchronized with webviews
• Specifying what an edit is
• Customization of VS Code's text editor using html / css
• Embedding of VS Code's text editor in webviews
• UI related to custom editors (beyond switching view types)

These all would fall under separate feature requests. Many also be a better fit for an external helper library instead of VS Code core

Tracking progress

This issue thread captures the evolution of the webview editor proposal. That means that many comments may now be out of date. Some of these have been minimized, others have not.

For the most up to date info, see:

• Most recent status update
• vscode.proposed.d.ts