Recently, I announced the public release of a new VS Code extension I created called grepc (grep + color).
I figured I would come on here and post about it along with some thoughts.
Grepc (grep + color) is a highly customizable regular expression highlighter for VS Code. This project marks the first official open source project I have released in a more professional setting (outside of mods and various side projects), and although it took a lot more work than I ever expected, I am quite proud of what it has become.
I think my first major realization going into this is the dedication and effort put out by open source creators. Open source is an amazing concept, and yet, I don’t think people realize the time and effort it goes into developing a project from scratch for free and provide it to others. If we take a look at my commit graph on Github, it tells a pretty interesting story.
In terms of days or work, this is quite a lot. But this was often a post work, 2 hour grind for many of these commits. But again, throughout April and May I was working pretty hard on this project. But perhaps this is a simple attention to detail issue.
The idea itself is pretty simple and has been overlapped in coverage from many other extensions. It seems to be that the “go-to” beginner project on VS Code is a text decorator, but no one seems to have piece together the idea of making it modular and customizable.
Everyone loves the “make a text that says blue be blue“, but no one has made a tool to customize it more.