Canned Dragons
Markdown Language Server In VS Code
A singer with big glasses once said “Saturday nights are alright for fighting.” I tend to think they are better for reading and writing blog posts in an IDE, though. If you’ve never tried writing a blog post in an interactive development environment like Visual Studio Code, tonight might be the time to check it out. They’ve just added support for a Markdown Language Server, which Matt Bierner details in this post.
But one day after mistyping an image path for what felt like the hundredth time, it finally hit me: this isn’t fun! Why am I wasting my life manually typing out and validating these links? That’s what tools are for! I knew I didn’t want just any tool, I wanted one that would help me read and write my Markdown as text instead of hiding the Markdown source behind some WYSIWYG-style UI magic. That’s very much in keeping with the ethos of VS Code and how we think about support for programming languages. Why shouldn’t many of the same smarts we offer for traditional programming languages apply to Markdown too? I started work on link completions the very next day.
Bierner’s post has a list of new features. I can already say that autocompletion of image paths has been a game changer for me. It allows me to store my images in a “Resources” folder and easily implement them when I’m blogging. Also, if you’re a person who likes to reference their own posts, whooo boy…
I’ve been a huge fan of Markdown since I discovered it years ago. Sometimes I think in the format. It used to be hard to come by apps that use it, but that has no longer been the case, in the last few years. It’s nice to see the development of VS Code helping to “push Markdown tooling forward for everyone.”
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