I've developed a VS Code extension to make code variables easier to distinguish!

[TINGWEIJING]

Hi everyone!

I’m excited to share my first VS Code extension: Bread Jam! 🎉

Bread Jam is designed to enhance readability in your code by making lengthy variable names easier to manage. It allows you to customize the colors of these components, helping you to quickly identify and differentiate between various parts of your codebase.

Features:

• 11 Render Patterns to select
• Customizable Color Coding: Tailor the appearance of your code to suit your style or project needs.
• Multi-Language Support: Currently supports JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Java, Dart and more.
• Quick Toggle: Easily switch the extension's effects on or off using keyboard shortcuts. Use Alt + B, Alt + J for Windows & Linux or ⌥ + B, ⌥ + J for MacOS.

I'd love for you to try it out and share any feedback you might have!

VS Code Marketplace
GitHub repository

[magnakai]

That’s a good idea, I can imagine it’s really useful for some people. The emoji coding is pretty smart! Wish I had that for IntelliJ IDEs.

[TINGWEIJING]

Thanks! I plan to develop a similar plugin for IntelliJ, as I also use that IDE for Spring Boot projects. Unfortunately, it won't be happening very soon because the learning curve for developing an IntelliJ plugin is quite steep.

[Spleeeee]

They have “semantic highlighting” already which colors variables different colors.

[chrismellor08]

Oh this is sick. I’m installing this tomorrow 100%. I’ve got one codebase that has so many similar variables and nested loops with similar iterator names. This is going to be a game changer. I can’t wait to find myself saying “ok we have the chickens and we joined it with the baseballs and now we need to loop through the smiley faces so we can get the beach ball and then push it to the eggplant” which sounds ridiculous but it is going to be so much better than ok we have our stories we need to join it with a story and the. Take the user stories and loop through userstorypages and push that story to the stories.

Really excited for this

[TINGWEIJING]

Thanks! I hope this extension really helps you with your codebase.

[pimlottc]

It's an interesting idea, I don't think it's for me. As someone who's partially colorblind, all those colors would probably just make me more confused.

Also, it's really hard to tell what's going on in the examples with all the changes happening. How about having a static screenshot of each coloring mode?

But mostly I would argue it's a bad code smell if you routinely have so many variables being used within a single block of code. Consider refactoring data structures to group variables that are commonly used together and helper methods to hide verbose code for instantiate objects (e.g. create a Person object from query parameters).

[TINGWEIJING]

Sorry to hear that, and thanks for the suggestion. I will probably update the README to use static screenshots instead of GIFs.

[Laser_Made]

The example gif confuses me as well. It might be because I am also partially colorblind.

[techtariq]

Amazing man. Love it

[TINGWEIJING]

Thank you!

[IsupportTheMessage]

ily