Change plain text color by indentation in VSCode

Question

I am interested in giving lectures and taking notes in simple text files within VSCode (since I already use it for coding).

However, for the life of me I cannot figure out how to change simple text color. What I want is to have one text color at one indentation depth. For instance,

Notes:
    a:
    b:

Notes would be a different color than a and b. I want this for clarity of bullet points. Is there a simple way?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can color lines with different indentation differently with an extension like Highlight. For instance I can get this:

with this code in settings.json:

"highlight.regexes": {

  "((?<!.))(\\w.*)": [
    {},
    {
      "color": "green",
      "fontWeight": "bold",
      // "outline": "1px solid #fff",
      "letterSpacing": "1px"
    }
  ],
  "((?<!.))(  )(\\w.*)": [
    {},
    {},
    {
      "color": "yellow",
    }
  ],
  "((?<!.))(    )(\\w.*)": [
    {},
    {},
    {
      "color": "red",
    }
  ]
}

My setup inserts 2 spaces per tab - I found that you need to use spaces in your regex, not something handier like (\\t\\t) or ( ){4} but instead must use ( ) - that is 4 spaces representing two tabs for me - for the regex to work in the extension.

For more styling options, see https://code.visualstudio.com/api/references/vscode-api#DecorationRenderOptions

The extension link shows how to restrict this to whichever filetype(s) you wish. Which I incorporated into the second batch of code below.

If you want only the bullet headings, like a-z or 1-9 to be colored and not the rest of the text on that line, that can be achieved in the regex too:

"highlight.regexes": {

  "((?<!.))(\\w.*)": { 
    "regexFlags": "gi", 
    // "filterLanguageRegex": "markdown", 
    "filterFileRegex": "Notes.*\\.txt", 
    "decorations": [
      {}, 
      { 
        "color": "green",
        "fontWeight": "bold",
        "letterSpacing": "1px",
        "textDecoration": "underline"
      },
    ]
  },


  "((?<!.))(  )([a-z1-9][:\\.])(.*)":  {
    "regexFlags": "gi", 
    // "filterLanguageRegex": "markdown", 
    "filterFileRegex": "Notes.*\\.txt", 
    "decorations": [
      {},
      {},
      {
        "color": "yellow",
      },
      {}
    ]
  },


  "((?<!.))(    )([a-z1-9][:\\.])(.*)": {
    "regexFlags": "gi", 
    // "filterLanguageRegex": "markdown", 
    "filterFileRegex": "Notes.*\\.txt", 
    "decorations": [
      {},
      {},
      {
        "color": "red",
      },
      {}
    ]
  }

[Restricted to files of the form Notes1.txt, Notes blsdfs .txt and similar.]

Obviously, you can have as many levels of indentation as you want with more regex entries following the same pattern.