[BUG] Blocks are not appearing after installation

[catelyn2332-design]

Are blocks supposed to appear directly after installation?

I installed Blockman, but the colored blocks don't appear in my code.
Instead, I only get:

• A changed background color on the whole editor, or
• Sometimes just vertical lines instead of full blocks.

I don't know if this is normal or not. I tried fixing it in Blockman's settings and in settings.json, but nothing works.

What I already tried:

• Blockman: Clear State Storage, Blockman: Toggle enable/disable

• Reload Window

• Set blockman.showBlockBackground: true, showBlockBorder: true, depthColors: true

• Disabled/enabled indent guides + bracket pair guides

• Reloaded VS Code several times

• VS Code version: 1.115.0

• Blockman version: v1.7.8

• OS: Windows

• Font used: Consolas, 'Courier New', monospace

• Other relevant extensions: Github Copilot

Can someone help me please?
Thank you in advance!

[leodevbro]

Hello, thanks for the feedback. It seems really strange for me. I have not seen such issue before. I am still trying to figure it out. First, please try different languages like Python or C# or anything, then also try creating a clean profile of VS Code where there is no extensions installed, and install Blockman only. I guess there is another extension installed on you current profile of VS Code, which interferes with the UI elements in the text files.

[catelyn2332-design]

I did more tests as you asked.

• In a clean profile with only Blockman installed, the problem is still there.
• Blockman only has issues on .ts and .json files.
• On Python, JavaScript, Markdown, etc... Blockman does nothing (no blocks at all and no background change).
• Even after disabling indent guides, bracket guides, etc.

Let me know if you need more info

[leodevbro]

Even more strange now. Please try updating VS Code to the latest version (1.117.0). Then also try installing Blockman on the VS Code Insiders latest version. Maybe your VS Code installation has some forcefully modified internal mechanism by previously installed some custom VS Code UI mods? If that is the case, then maybe you should try to completely reinstall VS Code.

[catelyn2332-design]

I updated VS Code to the latest version and Blockman now works perfectly in the desktop application.

I realized the issue only happens in the browser version of VS Code (vscode.dev / web workspace). In the browser, the blocks don't appear properly. I also get other UI glitches (like the terminal not showing, even by uninstalling/reinstalling).

Is this a known limitation with Blockman (or with this kind of visual extensions) on the browser version of VS Code?

Thank you very much for your help

[leodevbro]

Yes, it is a known limitation of web VS Code when you try to use an extension which has at least one WASM module. WASM in the browser is possible but pretty hard to implement and maintain. Long story short: VS Code does not give extensions access to native AST tokens (code blocks analyzation like finding starter/ender locations of nested blocks), so Blockman uses third party libraries to tokenize codes of many languages, and some of these libraries use WASM, so Blockman does not work in web VS Code so far. I am trying to find alternative libraries without WASM.

I actually posted a feature request in the VS Code repo for giving extensions access to the native AST tokens:
microsoft/vscode#177452