From Pain to Tool: How to Build Your Own VS Code Extension

In our team, documentation is closely tied to original solutions and non-standard processes: custom markup tags, proprietary HTML-components, examples written in an internal programming language. To simplify working with this stack, we developed a custom VS Code extension that has become an indispensable tool in our daily practice.

In this workshop, I will show the entire journey — from the initial idea to working code, share pitfalls of building an extension “from scratch”, and discuss key architectural decisions behind it. Together, we will go through the full cycle: from environment setup and the first launch to implementing features for rapid text editing, editor visual enhancements, working with templates and UI components. In the end, you will get a fully functional plugin that you can adapt to your needs, as well as the knowledge required to build your own plugin for your specific tasks.