Visual Studio Code Extensions for Writing

Having delved deeper into the world of (creative) writing during the past year, I had to incorporate some coding into my routine as well (to not got crazy). As I ended up doing all my writing in VSCode, and I’m not the only one (1, 2, 3, etc.), it meant I could create some hopefully useful extensions for fun and profit.

That’s how vscode-writing-suite was born. It’s an umbrella project containing multiple independent VSCode extensions – in the spirit of the Unix philosophy: “Make each program do one thing well.” – intended to help when writing text (specifically tailored to my writing process, of course):

First up is a simple Pomodoro timer with the addition of a word count tracker for the work time:

Pomodoro Writer helps with hitting your word count goal by showing how many words you have left to write.

Next is an outline visualizer that collates and displays the synopsis of a writing project:

Outline Writer provides an overview of the entire text, allowing to get a grasp of the structure at a glance.

Small note on the use of a monorepo

For no other reason than “code colocation”, I opted to put the two different extensions in the same Github repository.

Turns out using Github Actions makes it a breeze to still have completely separate workflows for each extension, only triggering the CI workflow for an extension when files in that directory was changed.