One of the most exciting things about working on an open-source project has always been the community involvement. This interaction allows for anyone to make feature requests, report issues or even fork the project and make it their own.
Glyphfriend has seen a huge spike in downloads since the release of Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 primarily due to being bundled in the popular Web Extension Pack.
As of this post, Glyphfriend currently has over 10,000 downloads and it continues to grow each day.
What is Glyphfriend (again)?
Glyphfriend is an open-source Visual Studio 2015 extension to enhance the existing Intellisense to display preview glyphs for many of the common glyph-based font libraries like Font Awesome, Foundation, IonIcons, Bootstrap Glyphicons and more.
What's New In Glyphfriend
Early last month, Ashhar Hasan posted an issue was posted within the Glyphfriend repository regarding a new feature that he would like to see in Glyphfriend (and that fit within the general purpose of the extension) and after a bit of tinkering, it now exists in the latest release : Emoji Support Within Markdown Files.
Now when you begin typing along within a Markdown file and hit the : key, you'll quickly see that Glyphfriend goes to work :
While this might not be a game-changer, it will certainly make the Markdown experience within Visual Studio mirror that of any other common sites that use Markdown, such as GitHub. With all of the fantastic features that are already in Visual Studio, there is no reason that it shouldn't be great for no only writing your code, but your Markdown as well.
How to Use GlyphFriend
Simply download the Glyphfriend extension and install it on any edition of Visual Studio 2015 from the Visual Studio Gallery. After doing this, you'll just need to include the appropriate CSS files for the library that you want to activate Intellisense for within your project (via direct inclusion or a NuGet package).
After you have added your libraries, Glyphfriend will handle detecting any classes that are present within them and pair them up with existing glyphs within the extension when you begin typing.
Want to contribute?
Glyphfriend is completely open-source you can find the repository here on GitHub.
Many of the Glyph libraries that were chosen were just some of the most commonly used ones that I had come across, but I am sure there are plenty of those that may have been left out. If you find that one of your favorites is missing you can do one of the following :
- Create an Issue / Request within Issues area of the GitHub repository
OR
- Fork the Glyphfriend project on GitHub
- Clone the repository on your local machine
- Install the Visual Studio 2015 SDK (required in order to extend Visual Studio 2015)
- Open the solution within Visual Studio 2015 and make your changes
- Submit a pull request when you have completed your changes
I’ll try to address any major issues as they arise (and update this release accordingly), but pull requests are openly accepted and encouraged.