Vithanco
Home / The best Tools for Structured Visual Thinking / Vithanco for Visual Studio Code

Vithanco for Visual Studio Code

Estimated reading time: 1 minutes.

Any fenced block tagged vgl is replaced with the rendered diagram when you open VS Code's Markdown preview. There is no custom viewer to learn and no separate panel to arrange.

```vgl
vgraph decision: IBIS "Should we ship?" {
  node q1: Question "Should we ship?";
  node a1: Answer "Yes, soon";
  node p1: Pro "Users have asked for it";
  node c1: Con "Docs are still thin";
  edge q1 -> a1;
  edge a1 -> p1;
  edge a1 -> c1;
}
```

Install

From the Visual Studio Marketplace, or search for Vithanco in the Extensions view.

VGL files

Files ending .vgl are recognised as their own language, so a diagram can live beside the code it documents rather than inside a Markdown file.

Self-contained

The engine and the layout engine are both bundled into the extension — no CDN, no downloads at render time, and no per-document "allow content" prompt, which is the usual friction with diagram extensions in VS Code.

That also means it works with no network at all, and that your diagrams are never sent anywhere to be rendered.

Diagrams in code review

Because the source is a text block, a diagram changes in a pull request the way code does: a readable diff, reviewable line by line, with the rendered result one preview away.

See also