[ANN] Julia Cell Highlighter—VS Code extension for highlighting Julia code cells

Tooling VS Code
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Hi all!
I just released Julia Cell Highlighter (GitHub), a VS Code extension that highlights the current Julia code cell and adds CodeLens actions to run cells.

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Key features:

  • Highlights the current cell as you move the cursor
  • Follows Julia’s julia.cellDelimiters when available
  • CodeLens buttons: [Run Cell] / [Run Cell and Move]
  • Visual separator lines above delimiters (independent from highlighting)
  • Exclude folders from highlighting/CodeLens while keeping separators

If you work with long .jl scripts and cell-style workflows, this should make navigation much clearer. Feedback and suggestions are welcome!

Background & Related Threads

This topic has been discussed in the Julia community for a long time. Here are representative threads that cover cell delimiters, execution behavior, and visual separation:

Julia Discourse

julia-vscode GitHub Issues

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Cool, I’ve wanted this for a long time :slight_smile: Just wondering why this can’t be part of the julia extension?

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Thanks for asking.

I chose to ship this as a standalone extension because I could build it from scratch quickly and publish it immediately. Contributing it upstream to the julia-vscode repository is typically a much longer process: it requires maintainer review, and there are currently 30+ open pull requests already in the queue, which suggests the team is constrained on bandwidth and reviews may not happen promptly.

That said, if the julia-vscode maintainers are interested in integrating this in the future, I’d be happy for them to copy/adopt all of my code.

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