Create Remark Presentations With VSCode

After one year of intermittent development, Remarkpy my Windows desktop application, which provides a convenient graphical interface for displaying remark-based presentations,has been progressively extended to include different text editors.

In this blog post, I would like to describe how I use Remarkpy together with VSCode.

I downloaded the .ZIP (64-bit) file from https://code.visualstudio.com/Download and unpacked it inside the empty folder %UserProfile%\VSCode. From Remarkpy's UI, I can click on Select text editor and paste the VSCode executable full path ( in my case %UserProfile%\VSCode\code.exe ). If I click on Edit Presentation, the source code will then be opened in VScode. Thus, I can change my slides and refresh the browser for an immediate display.

Refresh Browser on Save

The last step, save and automatically refresh the browser, can be easily implemented in VSCode thanks to the RunOnSave extension (there are more than one from different authors).

I created a new directory and inside this folder a .vscode subfolder. In the dot subfolder I added the following workspace configuration file, named settings.json.

    {
    "emeraldwalk.runonsave": {
        "commands": [
            {
                "match": "\\.md$",
                "cmd": "refresh_on_save.exe"
            }
        ]
    }
    }
    

I placed the refresh_on_save.exe, a small program created to refresh any running chromium-based browsers, inside the workspace base folder. This program will therefore run whenever the current markdown file is saved.

My typical VSCode workspace configuration is shown here.