Cedar policy language extension for Visual Studio Code

The Cedar policy language extension for Visual Studio Code is available for installation from the Visual Studio Marketplace as well as open source on GitHub at cedar-policy/vscode-cedar. This extension supports syntax highlighting, formatting, and validation of Cedar policy language (*.cedar) and Cedar schema (cedarschema.json / *.cedarschema.json) files.

This was a project I started near the beginning of 2023 as personal tool to make my editing of Cedar files easier. Why Visual Studio Code? It’s what I use everyday, and “remains the preferred IDE across all developers” per Stack Overflow 2022 Developer Survey with 74.48% of respondents. When Cedar became open source in May, I started the process to have this extension published and become open source since “half of developers (55%) install UI themes and add-ons for their IDEs or editors” according to The State of Developer Ecosystem 2022.

For a polished README, I created some (what I consider) nice looking animated GIF screen captures to show off the features, but wanted to find a solution that worked without installing any new software.

I put Visual Studio Code in full screen mode, then hid stuff I didn’t want on the screen, including extra left rail views, minimap, etc. I disabled any extensions adding unwanted problems (like spelling or markdown linting) that I didn’t wanted included.

I created a script for myself that would look good in a loop, Then recorded using QuickTime to a .mov file on my desktop. Since my laptop is a MacBook Pro 16” 2019, the native screen resolution was 3584x2240. I opened Keynote and set the custom size to 25% of that, or 896x540 then imported the .mov followed my an export to an Animated GIF, extra large resolution (1080x675), 15 fps, with 0-sec auto advance.