We have some boilerplate ready to go in the regular-expressionist folder in the vscode-examples repository. Our mission is to spin up a web view in order to load up a custom user interface.

We’re going to try out the following:

function openRegularExpressionist(context) {
	const panel = vscode.window.createWebviewPanel(
		'regularExpressionist', // Identifies the type of the webview
		'Regular Expressionist', // Title of the panel
		vscode.ViewColumn.One, // Editor column to show the new webview panel in
		{
			enableScripts: true, // We want to enable JS in the webview
		},
	);

	// Set the HTML content for the webview
	panel.webview.html = getWebviewContent();

	// Listen for messages from the webview
	panel.webview.onDidReceiveMessage(
		(message) => {
			if (message.command === 'evaluateRegex') {
				const { pattern, text, flags } = message;
				const response = evaluateRegularExpression(pattern, text, flags);
				// Send the results back to the webview
				panel.webview.postMessage({ command: 'updateResult', data: response });
			}
		},
		undefined,
		context.subscriptions,
	);
}