Markdown Mention Highlight

A VS Code extension that highlights @mentions in Markdown files with a configurable color.

Features

• Highlights @mentions (e.g. @alice, @team-leads) inline in any Markdown file
• Configurable highlight color via VS Code settings
• Non-destructive: merges with your existing token color customizations

Installation

This extension is distributed as a .vsix file for local installation.

npm install
make install

Or via the UI after make package: open the Extensions panel, click the ... menu, and choose Install from VSIX....

Configuration

Setting	Type	Default	Description
mentionHighlight.color	string	#9b8fbf	Hex color used to highlight @mentions in Markdown files

Change the color in your VS Code settings:

{
  "mentionHighlight.color": "#e06c75"
}

After changing the color, VS Code will prompt you to reload the window for the token color update to take effect.

Development

Prerequisites: Node.js, npm, VS Code

npm install

• Compile: make build
• Watch mode: make watch (or make watch-bg to background it)

Testing in the Extension Development Host

1. Open this folder in VS Code
2. Press F5 (or Run → Start Debugging)
3. A second VS Code window opens with the extension loaded
4. Open test/mentions.md in that window to see highlighting in action
5. After making changes, run Developer: Reload Window in the second window to pick them up

How It Works

The extension injects a TextMate grammar into text.html.markdown (excluding code blocks and inline code) that matches the pattern @[\w_-]+ and assigns it the scope markup.mention.markdown. On activation, it writes a token color rule for that scope into your global editor.tokenColorCustomizations setting using the configured color.

The scope markup.mention.markdown is intentionally generic — using a scope like entity.name.tag would cause themes to apply their own color (typically blue) rather than the configured one.

Requirements

• VS Code 1.85.0 or later

License

MIT