I built a VSCode extension to easily embed links into markdown
Easily embed links into your markdown in VSCode.
Purpose and Goal
After starting my blog and wiki, I've been writing a lot more markdown. When writing markdown, I found myself constantly adding links.
The syntax to add a link in markdown is:
[Alt Text](https://mylink.com)It's fairly straightforward and easy to remember. The issue I had was that constantly tabbing out to add links made me lose my train of thought and disrupted my workflow.
So I decided to create a VSCode extension that allows me to easily add links without ever leaving my markdown to search for the appropriate link.
Demo
- Highlight the text you want to add a link to.
- Use the command palate to launch the extension or bind it to a hotkey.
- Modify and confirm your search.
- Choose the appropriate link.
Thought Process
The one-stop shop for links is, undoubtedly, Google. Keeping that in mind, I decided to use the Google Custom Search API to populate the results.
I also made use of VSCode's QuickPick for the main UI.
I Did An Oopsie
After committing my code in order to package it for the Microsoft Extension store, about 2 hours later I got an email from a company called GitGuardian, which I'd never heard of before.
I'd committed my Google Search API Key to a public repository—a very big no-no.
To fix this, I had to use environment variables, something I'd used before in my work but never really had to set up myself.
I installed the dotenv package for Node.js and managed to fix it, learning quite a bit in the process.
Closing Thoughts & Final Improvements
This was a fun little project and the first time I'd ever coded an extension. The fact that extensions are not a common project meant that StackOverflow wasn't as good a resource as it normally was.
Instead, I really had to dig through the documentation to figure out what I was looking for and it was very satisfying when it finally worked.
Work on a project that you'll actually use...
- literally every tutorial ever.
This was also the first time I built something that I actually use and that's something I'm pretty proud of.
Before I worked on this project, I looked around and couldn't find anything like this, so I'm sure there's a use case for it for others as well. Unfortunately, the Google Search API only allows a maximum of 100 queries a day, so promoting it doesn't interest me a lot.