Because sometimes making a gist on github is just too tedious

It started from a conversation today at work.

"You know how you can preview markdown files as HTML in Visual Studio Code?"

"Yeah"

"What if there was an extension that could do this previewing as well, but with non-binary geospatial data files like GeoJSON? So you don't have to ... you know ... go to github, make a gist, paste your GeoJSON and preview?"

"That would be awesome!"

So once I got home, I did some research to answer some questions that will test whether this idea is feasible:

• Does VSCode provide an extension point for previewing editor content? Yes
• Can the HTML preview result run JavaScript? Yes, but it currently looks like a PITA to debug if there is scripting errors in the preview content. Hey I could be wrong!

That confidence boosting set of findings gave me enough motivation to fire up VSCode, yo generate a new TypeScript VSCode extension project, wait for npm to install 50 bajillion packages and set out to hack out an MVP extension for VSCode.

2 and a half hours later ...

I love it when you have an idea, the idea shows feasibility after some encouraging results from research and after some hacking around, you reach a point like the above gif that tells you ... yes this idea definitely has some legs and you should keep on going!