Region Helper

A Visual Studio Code extension for navigating, visualizing, and managing code regions.

⚡️ Features

• 📁 Regions View – Interactive tree for navigating regions.
• 🏛 Full Outline View – Unified interactive tree for regions and language symbols.
• ⚠️ Diagnostics – Detects unmatched region boundaries.
• 🐇 Quick Navigation – Jump, search, and select regions with commands.

📖 Table of Contents

1. ⚡️ Features
2. 📖 Table of Contents
3. 🔬 Detailed Features
   1. 📂 Regions View
   2. 🏛 Full Outline View
   3. ⚠️ Region Diagnostics
   4. 🔍 Go to Region...
   5. 🐇 Go to Region Boundary
   6. ⏭ Go to Next / Previous Region
   7. 🎯 Select Current Region
4. ⚙️ Settings
   1. 🙈 Show/Hide Views
   2. 🔄 Toggling Auto-Highlighting in Views
   3. 🔧 Custom Region Patterns
5. 📡 Extension API
6. 🚀 Installation
7. 🚧 Known Limitations
8. ❤️ Contributing & Feedback

🔬 Detailed Features

📂 Regions View

• Displays a structured tree view of all regions in the current file.
• Automatically reveals and highlights the cursor’s active region (this can be toggled on/off with commands/settings).
• Click a region to instantly navigate to it.

🏛 Full Outline View

• Combines all regions and language symbols (classes, methods, variables, etc) into a unified tree view for the current file.
• Just like the Regions View, the cursor's active region/symbol is automatically revealed and highlighted, and this behavior can be toggled on/off.
• Click any item to instantly navigate to it.

⚠️ Region Diagnostics

• Detects unmatched region boundaries and adds warnings in both the editor (blue squiggles) and the Problems panel, helping you catch incomplete or misplaced regions quickly.

🔍 Go to Region...

• Like VSCode’s built-in "Go to Symbol...", but for regions:
  • Opens a fuzzy-searchable dropdown to jump to any region in the current file.
• 📌 Default Keybinding:
  • Windows/Linux: Ctrl + Shift + R
  • Mac: Cmd + Shift + R

🐇 Go to Region Boundary

• Like VSCode’s built-in "Go to Bracket", but for regions:
  • Jumps between matching start and end region boundaries.
  • Jumps to the next region if the cursor is not already inside a region.
• 📌 Default Keybinding: Alt + M

⏭ Go to Next / Previous Region

• Jumps to the next or previous region in the file.
• 📌 Default Keybindings:
  • Next Region: Ctrl + Alt + N
  • Previous Region: Ctrl + Alt + P

🎯 Select Current Region

• Selects the entire active region containing the cursor.
• 📌 Default Keybinding: Alt + Shift + M

⚙️ Settings

🙈 Show/Hide Views

To quickly show or hide the Regions or Full Outline views, you can use the following commands and associated settings:

• Show/Hide Region View
  • Commands: Show Regions View / Hide Regions View
  • Setting: regionHelper.shouldShowRegionsView
• Show/Hide Full Outline View
  • Commands: Show Full Outline View / Hide Full Outline View
  • Setting: regionHelper.shouldShowFullOutlineView

🔄 Toggling Auto-Highlighting in Views

• Sometimes you might want to keep the Regions View or Full Outline View collapsed, but the auto-highlighting of the active region/item will annoyingly re-open the view.
• To avoid this, you can use the following commands/settings to toggle this auto-revealing / auto-highlighting behavior:
  • Regions View:
    • Commands: Regions View: Stop Auto-Highlighting Active Region / Regions View: Start Auto-Highlighting Active Region
    • Setting: regionHelper.regionsView.shouldAutoHighlightActiveRegion
  • Full Outline View:
    • Commands: Full Outline View: Stop Auto-Highlighting Active Item / Full Outline View: Start Auto-Highlighting Active Item
    • Setting: regionHelper.fullOutlineView.shouldAutoHighlightActiveItem
  • Each view also has a title bar action to toggle this setting:

🔧 Custom Region Patterns

• Supports nearly 50 languages out of the box, including:
  • C, C++, C#, Java, Python, JavaScript, JSX, TypeScript, TSX, PHP, Ruby, Swift, Go, Rust, HTML, XML, Markdown, JSON/JSONC, YAML, SQL, and more.
• Define your own custom region patterns, or adjust the existing default patterns, to customize how regions are parsed.
  • Setting: regionHelper.regionBoundaryPatternByLanguageId

📡 Extension API

Region Helper provides an API for accessing code regions and full outline symbols programmatically. You can use it to build region-aware tools for VSCode without having to write your own file-parsing logic.

See the full API documentation for details and examples.

🚀 Installation

1. Install Region Helper from the VSCode Marketplace.
2. ???
3. Profit!

(Really, things should work out of the box. Let me know if they don't!)

🚧 Known Limitations

• 🔍 Go to Region... only supports camelCase matching (not full fuzzy search) due to a VSCode API limitation.
• The 📁 Regions and 🏛 Full Outline tree views always highlight the cursor's last active item, even when outside any region/symbol (another VSCode API limitation).

❤️ Contributing & Feedback

I may have limited availability, but bug reports, suggestions, and contributions are always welcome! Feel free to:

• File an issue for bugs or feature requests.
• Browse issues open to PRs and submit one if you'd like to help.
• Leave a review to share your thoughts or overall feedback.

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Hope you enjoy using Region Helper! Have a great day, and try to make someone else's day great too. 😊