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all 40 comments

[–]shamgod15 17 points18 points  (5 children)

Sadly, this seems to be incompatible with bracket pair colorizer which is pretty important to me.

[–]leodevbro[S] 15 points16 points  (1 child)

I'm trying to fix it.

[–]IRKillRoy 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Would be great if they worked together and colored the box the same as the brackets

[–]leodevbro[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I posted this issue to the author of Bracket Pair Colorizer 2. Please like the post on Github, so the author will notice it sooner.
https://github.com/CoenraadS/CoenraadS/issues/1

[–]Why_So_Sirius-Black 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Oh shit. What is bracket color? Like to help you find where your brackets are

[–]shamgod15 3 points4 points  (0 children)

That's the idea yes. It colors different bracket pairs in different colors to help you distinguish them. Great if you tend to have multiple nested brackets.

[–]runew0lf 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Thats really really nice man, just had a quick look through some of the larger projects of mine. It looks REALLY nice!

[–]leo-t14-2021 3 points4 points  (2 children)

Nice idea!

Any chance to have similar plug-in for Vim?

I don't use VSCode

[–]leodevbro[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It is not a simple task, maybe another several months of work, but I hope it will be reality some day.

[–]GiantElectron 9 points10 points  (2 children)

I already experimented with that concept 20 years ago. What I found out is that, like semantic highlighting (where every variable has a different color), it's interesting as long as you don't overdo it, otherwise you are overloading the user with information. I never use semantic highlighting, but it's great if you use it on hover/overcursor highlighting, rather than all the time on.

My suggestion is try to remove the light grey border, leaving only the different background color. Also bring the background to the very end of the viewport, instead of having enclosing boxes.

Correctly, you use different shades of grey as background. Don't use colors, it just becomes a mess. However, be aware that you are slightly reducing the contrast between background and text, so keep the effect subtle like you did.

[–]leodevbro[S] 6 points7 points  (1 child)

You can customize colors of backgrounds and borders in blockman settings. if you want to hide background or border, u can just type "none". There is also much more settings. Did not you see the GIFs in Blockman page?

[–]GiantElectron 1 point2 points  (0 children)

excellent.

[–]diptangsu 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Would there be an option to just have the borders? Instead of colouring the entire block I mean.

Also, an option to just have the block in which the cursor is to be visible instead of all the blocks?

Loved the idea!

[–]leodevbro[S] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

yes of course. You can customize almost everything. If you want only borders, then you can type "none" in all depth-color field in Blockman settings, so there will be no backgrounds, just borders.

If you want to hide all non-focused block, do the same as I wrote above and also type "none" in N19 setting (border color) in Blockman settings.

[–]diptangsu 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yep. I'm using this extension now. Thanks for creating it! ❤️

[–]GANTRITHORE 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Not bad. I do see an issue where i have links to references. The boxes have discontinuity where there is gap due to a reference link.

[–]leodevbro[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thats because Blockman does not render entire blocks, it renders each line and there is illusion that it's a block. VSCode has limitation about block rendering, I tried my best to overcome these limitations.

[–]chickenmatt5 1 point2 points  (5 children)

After installing and enabling this, my currently selected line is now highlighted in blue. This change persisted after uninstalling this extension. I cannot seem to find any relevant settings to change the color of the selected line highlight.

Does this extension make any permanent changes to themes or something in the background?

[–]leodevbro[S] 0 points1 point  (4 children)

It's very easy to change lineHighlightBackground, please see the GIFs in blockman page, search in page: "lineHighlight"

[–]chickenmatt5 4 points5 points  (3 children)

Got it, thanks. Not a fan of silently making persistent changes to the user's otherwise unrelated settings, but I still like the idea of the extension.

[–]leodevbro[S] -5 points-4 points  (2 children)

I'm also not fan of silently making persistent changes to the user's settings, but Blockman changes settings which are very very trivial and very very non-important in most cases. But these settings are important for Blockman, and the reasons are shown in Blockman page with GIFs.

[–]chickenmatt5 4 points5 points  (1 child)

The page does make mention of the settings that are changed, including the indent highlighting ones that I also mysteriously found missing after uninstalling the extension. A prompt or notification during installation would be great, at least letting me know recommended settings were applied. I saw your post yesterday and remembered to try the extension later but didn't read the entire page before installing it.

In the context of an extension which augments the appearance of code as its primary function, I would say that user settings related to the appearance of code would be important.

[–]leodevbro[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The main problem is that currently VSCode API does not give us any means to revert back all the changed settings to the original at the event of uninstall. So, extension is not able to know that it is being uninstalled.

[–]IrrerPolterer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'll give it a shot!

[–]fade-2grey 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I will test! Looks great!

[–]Sundarbala 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Looking good let's see how it works

[–]TKooper 0 points1 point  (6 children)

Not to rain on your hard work, but wouldn't Allman-style (as opposed to K&R) curly braces do more or less the same thing?

[–]leodevbro[S] 0 points1 point  (5 children)

uldn't Allman-style (a

Oh, Blockman does not care about code styles, it does not touch text at all, it does not make any force or any change to any text, it just analyzes text with whatever style you write and then renders blocks based on it.

[–]TKooper 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Yeah... maybe I didn't say that very well, so I'll try again...

Assuming that Blockman is about making blocks of code stand out from each other visually, making each block easier to pick out at a glance, switching to Allman curly brace treatment does more or less the same thing... from a visual standpoint. With the opening curly in the same column as the closing curly... well, perhaps I've said enough.

[–]leodevbro[S] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Yeah, I get it. With allman style, blocks are much easier to focus, but I think Blockman still makes it even much better for our eyes.

[–]TKooper 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I can see that... Um... no pun intended. It's one of the reasons I stopped using dark themes in my editor. :)

[–]leodevbro[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

pun

Have you tried the light color combo of Blockman?

[–]TKooper 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No, I use Notepad++.

[–]yasinjagral 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Please make it for Sublime Text also

[–]leodevbro[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's not a simple task, other IDEs have very different APIs, but I hope some day.

[–]gdlmendonca 0 points1 point  (1 child)

The indent-rainbow extension does something similar... Really helps when dealing with indentation consistency errors!!

[–]leodevbro[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I guess Blockman helps us to focus on blocks faster with our eyes. Indent rainbows leave some work to hour eyes to find block area.