The Webview UI Toolkit is a component library for building webview-based extensions in Visual Studio Code.
Some of the library's features include:
- Visual Studio Code design language: All components follow the design language of Visual Studio Code, which enables developers to create extensions that have a consistent look and feel with the rest of the editor.
- Automatic support for color themes: All components are designed with theming in mind, and will automatically display the current editor theme.
- Tech stacks: The library ships as a set of web components. This means developers can use the toolkit no matter which tech stack – React, Vue, Svelte, etc. – their extension is built with.
- Immediate accessibility: All components ship with web-standard compliant ARIA labels and keyboard navigation.
Follow the Getting Started Guide.
If you already have a webview-based extension, you can install the toolkit with the following command:
npm install --save @vscode/webview-ui-toolkit
For more information, check out the following documentation:
- Component Docs
- Toolkit Extension Samples
- Figma Toolkit
- Storybook (Interactive Component Sandbox)
- Visual Studio Code Webview Guide
- Visual Studio Code Webview Guidelines
- Visual Studio Code Extension API Docs
Webviews are a powerful way to add custom functionality beyond what the Visual Studio Code API supports. They're fully customizable, which, historically, has meant that the responsibility of developing UI which aligns with the Visual Studio Code design language and follows our webview guidelines lies in the hands of extension authors.
The Webview UI Toolkit shifts some of this responsibility away from extension developers. It does this by providing core components that make it easier to build higher quality webview UIs in Visual Studio Code.
With all this said, we still strongly encourage you to carefully review whether or not your extension needs to use webviews before building. While webviews provide a great way to add custom functionality, oftentimes, they come at the cost of performance and accessibility.
The core Visual Studio Code API provides a vast array of building blocks for highly performant, accessible, and tightly integrated extension experiences. Generally, we encourage you to use them before webviews. If you haven't already, check out this overview of API capabilities to get an idea of what's possible.
Finally, if you're ever unsure if your extension should use webviews or not, you should open an issue and we'll give you some feedback and guidance.
Read the contributing documentation.
Microsoft and any contributors grant you a license to any code in the repository under the MIT License, see the LICENSE file.
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