Text Power Tools

Text Power Tools is an all-in-one text manipulation extension for VS Code inspired by TextFX for Notepad++ and Filter Lines and Text Pastry for Sublime Text. All commands supports multiple selections where it is applicable, and many of them can target new documents, so the original source remains unchanged.

All features are available from either the Command Palette or the editor context menu. To access the commands from the Command Palette use Ctrl+Shift+P, and enter tpt or part of your favourite Text Power Tool command name (e.g. filter, guid etc.) to quickly access the list of available commands. Almost all commands are available from the editor context menu, which is accessible from the Text Power Tools submenu after right clicking in the editor area.

Availability:

• VS Code Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=qcz.text-power-tools
• OpenVSX: https://open-vsx.org/extension/qcz/text-power-tools

Text Power Tools is also available as a Web Extension so it can be used on sites like vscode.dev.

Note: Due to current architectural limitations of VSCode, no extension can access files larger than 50 Megabytes. Vote for VSCode issue 31078, which once implemented, will allows this extension to work with these large files. In the meantime you can trick VSCode by opening a new file and copying the content of the large file there (without saving).

Features

• Filter lines using strings or regular expressions (grep like experience): Filter line commands take an input – a raw text, a regular expression or the selected text – and filter – exclude or include – the selected lines using that input. It works like the grep command but inside VS Code.

  • Protip: The command provides a history feature with the last 10 filter texts available to use immediately.
  • Protip: Filter commands can project the results to a new editor, so the original content is not modified. This way you can create multiple projections from your content without reloading the file or reverting the changes made by the filter command. Search for commands with into a new editor at the end to use this feature.
  • Protip: There are commands to copy or cut resulting lines to the clipboard.
  • Protip: These commands search/match in a case insensitive manner. To use case sensitive search/match, set the value of the textPowerTools.caseSensitiveFiltering setting to true.

• Change case of text (camelCase, PascalCase, snake_case, CONSTANT_CASE, dash-case, dot.case, Title Case) and swap casing.

  • Note: Title Case, UPPER CASE and lower case is not implemented in this extension as it is available in VS Code by default via the Transform to Title Case, Transform to Uppercase and Transform to Lower Case commands.

• Slugify and latizine text (latinize removes all diacritic characters)

• Insert decimal, hexadecimal and Roman numbers: Inserts increasing/decreasing decimal, hex or Roman numbers. You can even specify the starting number and the step size for them. You can use one selection and it will prompt for how many elements to insert, or you can use multiple selections and it will insert the a number from the sequence into every selection.

  • Protip: When inserting hex numbers, by default they will be uppercase. To insert lowercase hex numbers, set the value of the textPowerTools.insertUppercaseHexNumbers setting to false.

• Convert numbers from decimal to hexadecimal and vice versa

• Insert series of items from predefined list of items: Inserts sequence of items from a predefined set. You can use one selection and it will prompt for how many elements to insert, or you can use multiple selections and it will insert the a number from the sequence into every selection. Currently the following predefined sequences are supported:

  • Uppercase letters
  • Lowercase letters
  • Uppercase Greek letters
  • Lowercase Greek letters
  • NATO phonetic alphabet
  • Long english month names
  • Short english month names
  • Long english day names
  • Short english day names
  • Long current/custom locale month names
  • Short current/custom locale month names
  • Long current/custom locale day names
  • Short current/custom locale day names

  (Note: current/custom locale means OS locale or the locale specified in the textPowerTools.customLocale setting)

• Generate fake/random data:

  • Random hex/decimal character sequences
  • Fake first names, last names and full names in the following languages: English, French, German and Hungarian.
  • GUIDs/UUIDs (globally unique identifiers or universally unique identifiers) using multiple predefined formats (no dashes, dashes, dashes and braces, C# Guid constructor).
    • To insert GUIDs with uppercase hex characters, set the value of the textPowerTools.insertUppercaseGuids setting to true. The default GUID style can be set using the textPowerTools.defaultGuidType setting.
  • IPv4 and Ipv6 addresses
  • Lorem ipsum sentences
  • Lorem ipsum paragraphs

• Pad start and end of strings: Pad the start or the end of selections to the desired length with default or custom character sequences. The default pad string can be customized with the textPowerTools.defaultPadString setting.

• Insert line numbers: Inserts line numbers to the start of each line in every selection. Line numbers can be real line numbers in the file or can start with 1.

• Remove duplicated, blank, surplus blank, empty, surplus empty lines and control characters

• Replace new lines and whitespace with a single space

• Trim leading & trailing whitespace, remove whitespace characters, remove newlines

  • Note: There are disabled by default built-in settings for trimming trailing whitespace and secondary newlines at the end of file:
  • • files.trimTrailingWhitespace – When true, will trim trailing whitespace when saving a file.
  • • files.trimFinalNewlines – When true, will trim all new lines after the final new line at the end of the file when saving it.

• Prefix, suffix and wrap lines: Prefix, suffix and wrap lines. Wrap uses either the same prefix/suffix or different ones.

• Insert full file path, directory path and file name of the opened file.

• Escape text for JSON and convert text to JSON string

• Insert Unix timestamp

• Extract information from the source lines using regular expressions: First input is the regular expression which should be matched with capture groups to find the desired parts of the lines (e.g.: (\d.\d) dogs). The second input is the replacement rule, which should contain capture group references (e.g. $1 cats). You can insert newlines with \n to the output. With these commands you can transform matching lines to the desired format in seconds.

  The last 10 filter strings and replacement expressions are presented and can be used quickly when executing these commands.

• Count occurrences of lines: This command will counts how many times a line appears in the selected text and generates an output with the number of occurrences and the lines themselves.

• Various sorting methods which all supports ascending and descending orders

  • Case sensitive sort lines
  • Case sensitive sort lines starting at column
  • Case insensitive sort lines starting at column
  • Sort lines by length (and then case sensitive)
  • Sort lines by length (and then case insensitive)
  • Sort lines by semver rules
  • Sort lines by word count
  • Sort lines by grapheme count (taking care of surrogate pairs and combining marks thanks to Voca)
  • Sort lines containing IP addresses (including CIDR ranges)

• Shuffle lines

  • There are additional commands to convert between them using 8, 16, 32 and 64 bit arithmetic

• Increase/decrease decimal and hexadecimal numbers

  • There are commands to increase and decrease with 1 and with a custom increment.
  • There are additional commands to increase/decrease hexadecimal numbers using 8, 16, 32 and 64 bit arithmetic.

• Format content as table by splitting text to pieces by predefined or custom characters or strings and formatting them as a table with equal length columns using space characters.

  Text can be splitted by tabulators, semicolons, commas, pipes or any custom character sequences.

• Text slots, which are permanent clipboard entries in your VS Code. There are 5 of them. You can store a text in one of these slots with a command, for example Set text slot 1 content, and paste it with Paste text slot 1 content later. Recommended to bind the paste commands you use to a key combo of your choice for the quick usage.

• Encode and decode various encoding formats: URL encode, HTML entities, XML entities, Base64 and unicode escape sequences

• Convert to Unicode normalization forms (NFC, NFD, NFKC, NFKD)

• Convert to Zalgo text

• Copy content of selections to a new editor

• Duplicate and repeat selection content

Showcase

Filtering in action

Description:

• Opening the VS Code Command Palette with Ctrl+Shift+P
• Entering filter, so Text Power Tools' filter commands are displayed
• Selecting the Text Power Tools: Filter lines including string into a new editor command
• Entering tiger as the filter text
• The command runs and pipes the result into a new editor

Extracting information in action

Counting the number of occurrences

Formatting text as table

Requirements

Before 1.16.0, the extension required at least Visual Studio Code 1.26. After 1.16.0, the extension requires at least Visual Studio Code 1.50.

License

MIT

Sample images use text files from the Elasticsearch Examples and TensorFlow Models projects. Both are under the Apache 2.0 License.

My other extensions

• Restart TS server Status Bar button – Convenient button on the Status Bar for restarting TS server: VS Code Marketplace / OpenVSX