maxandClaude Opus 5
3e8ece8ed7
The panel guessed that any capitalised identifier was a type, so `Profiler.Frames.Count` came out as three type-coloured names where the editor shows a class and two members. The semantic overlay already fetches per-file tokens, so feed the same data to the webview. - codeSpans() returns the server's token spans per referenced line in the row's own trimmed coordinates; rows carry them and the webview colours from them, mapping token type names to its palette. Fields, properties, events and methods share the member colour, as they do in the stock themes. - The regex tokenizer stays as the fallback for servers that serve no semantic tokens, and coloredReferences.semanticTokens now gates both views rather than just the editor. Colours are still the approximated Dark+/Light+ palette — a webview is not given the theme's token colours — so only the editor view can be theme-exact. The README says so instead of promising this would fix it. Two things the new tests establish, both assumptions the code was already making: all files in a result share the origin's legend, so decoding tokens from every file against one legend is sound; and all 237 relocated tokens in the Profiler search report the same type name as their source token. Also relaxes an over-specific assertion: DotRush calls Profiler.Frames a field, not a property. Either way it is a member, which is what matters. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Colored References
Find All References results shown the way Visual Studio does it — in two views.
Editor view (default) writes the results into a read-only virtual document in the same language as your
source file, so your theme colors every line for free — including identifiers, because the semantic tokens
are fetched from the real source files and relocated into the results (see Semantic tokens below). File
headers show the containing project
(.csproj/.fsproj/.vbproj) and reference count; line numbers are shown in the gutter. Read references are
highlighted like search matches; writes are bold on the theme's stronger write-occurrence background, the
same colour the editor itself uses for a write.
Panel view shows the same results as a table with resizable, sortable columns — Code, File, Line, Kind,
Project and Containing member — grouped by file, with a filter box and a reads/writes filter. By default it
docks in the bottom panel
alongside Terminal and Problems, where a wide, short table reads best; you can drag it to either side bar,
or set coloredReferences.panelLocation to put it in an editor group instead.
Works with any language server that implements references: DotRush, C# Dev Kit, OmniSharp, TypeScript, Rust, Go, ...
Usage
| Action | How |
|---|---|
| Find references | Ctrl+Alt+F12 (Cmd+Alt+F12 on mac), right-click → Find All References (Colored), or the command palette |
| Pick a view explicitly | References: Find All References in Colored Editor / … in Results Panel |
| Switch the current results to the other view | Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F12, or the split icon in the tab bar |
| Go to a reference | Enter, F12, or Ctrl+Click on a result line. Enter on a file header opens the file. |
| Re-run the search | F5, or the refresh icon in the tab bar / panel toolbar |
In the panel, a single click previews a reference without leaving the panel, Enter or a double-click jumps to
it, arrow keys walk the list, Ctrl+F focuses the filter, and clicking a column header sorts by it. Drag a
column edge to resize it; double-click the edge to reset it.
The All / Reads / Writes buttons filter by kind, and the summary line counts the writes. Kind also works in
the text filter, so typing write narrows to writes as well. See Known limitations for where the kind comes
from.
Semantic tokens
VS Code colors code twice: a TextMate grammar handles keywords, strings and comments from the text alone, then the language server's semantic tokens recolor identifiers by what they actually are — a class, a method, a parameter. That second pass is why a C# file settles into its final colors a moment after you open it.
Language servers will not serve semantic tokens for the results document: its colored-refs URI has no file
and no compilation behind it. So the tokens are fetched for each source file instead and relocated into
results-document coordinates — the same line and column mapping the extension already uses to place the
highlights. The colouring you get is the server's own answer, moved, rather than a guess.
In the editor view this happens after the results are on screen and only ever changes colours, never text, so
nothing waits on it. The panel gets the same token types but paints them from its own palette, since a
webview is not given the theme’s token colours. Set coloredReferences.semanticTokens to false for
grammar-only colouring; results spanning more than 40 files skip it.
Settings
coloredReferences.view— which viewFind All References (Colored)opens:document(default) orpanelcoloredReferences.panelLocation— where the panel opens:bottom(default, docked next to Terminal / Problems and draggable to a side bar),beside(editor group to the side), orbelow(editor group underneath, so the table is wide and short)coloredReferences.semanticTokens— colour identifiers by what the language server says they are, in both views (defaulttrue)coloredReferences.openBeside— open results beside the current editor (defaulttrue)coloredReferences.showProject— show the containing project in file headers (defaulttrue)coloredReferences.reuseTab— reuse one results tab/panel instead of opening a new one per search (defaulttrue)
Install
Either install the .vsix (Extensions view → … → Install from VSIX…) or open this folder in VS Code,
run npm install, and press F5 to launch an Extension Development Host.
Tests
npm test launches a real VS Code against a C# solution, waits for the language server to answer, and asserts
on the rendered results — that every displayed line maps back to the source line it claims, that navigation and
hover work, that the panel's rows highlight the right occurrence, and that the containing member resolves.
Point it at your own solution with COLORED_REFS_TEST_FOLDER:
COLORED_REFS_TEST_FOLDER=/path/to/solution npm test
The run opens a generated .code-workspace that pins DotRush to the solution found in that folder, so your
repository's own .vscode/settings.json is left alone. C# Dev Kit and OmniSharp are disabled for the run so
the expected results stay deterministic.
Known limitations
- The panel's code column cannot use your theme's token colors: webviews are not given them as CSS variables.
What each token is comes from the language server, so
Profiler.Frames.Countis correctly a class then two properties — but the hues are approximated Dark+/Light+ values, so a custom theme will not match exactly. Only the editor view can be theme-exact. Without a server that serves semantic tokens the panel falls back to a small regex tokenizer, which does guess that any capitalised identifier is a type. - Read/write kind is not part of the reference request, so it is derived two ways. Every reference is first
classified from the surrounding text (assignment and compound-assignment operators,
++/--,ref/outarguments), thentextDocument/documentHighlightis asked per file and itsRead/Writekinds override that wherever the server has an opinion. Servers that answer with plainTexthighlights, or not at all, leave the syntactic answer standing — which is good for straightforward code and can be wrong for exotic expressions. Results spanning more than 60 files skip the server round-trip entirely. The editor view paints the syntactic answer immediately and re-paints if the server disagrees, so it never waits on highlights. - Some language servers try to attach to every document of their language, including the virtual one, and may log a harmless error about an unknown URI scheme.
Roadmap
Webview panel with resizable, sortable columns— done; missing: virtualized rendering for very large result sets, and remembering column layout per workspace rather than per panelSemantic token overlay— done in both views- Filter by project / exclude tests
Read/write kind— done in both views