[FEATURE] Syntax highlighting in VS Code extension chat panel (re-opening closed requests)

Status Open

Maintainer reply None cached

Activity 10 comments · opened Jun 3, 2026

Summary

The Claude Code VS Code extension renders fenced code blocks in the chat panel as plain monochrome text. No syntax highlighting is applied regardless of the language tag (typescript, python, diff, etc.) or the user's active VS Code theme.

Context

This has been reported before but both issues were closed by the stale bot without a maintainer decision:

#54295 — Add syntax highlighting to fenced code blocks in the VS Code extension chat panel
#21667 — Code blocks in Claude Code's chat interface only show a dark background without full syntax highlighting

Since code suggestions are the primary output of Claude Code, reading monochrome code is noticeably slower. Users already have grammars, language servers, and themes configured — the chat panel is the only place that ignores them.

Proposed implementation

VS Code exposes APIs for exactly this:

TextMate grammar tokenization via vscode.languages — renders with the active theme, no extra dependency
Shiki (same lib VS Code's markdown preview uses) — lightweight fallback

Expected behavior

Code blocks are tokenized by their language tag and styled with the active VS Code theme, matching the editor appearance.

View original on GitHub ↗

9 Comments

github-actions[bot] · 2 months ago

Found 3 possible duplicate issues:

This issue will be automatically closed as a duplicate in 3 days.

If your issue is a duplicate, please close it and 👍 the existing issue instead
To prevent auto-closure, add a comment or 👎 this comment

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

Deluvio · 2 months ago

Found 3 possible duplicate issues: 1. [[FEATURE] Add syntax highlighting to fenced code blocks in the VS Code extension chat panel #54295](https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/54295) 2. [[FEATURE] Syntax highlighting for code blocks in VS Code chat panel #59468](https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/59468) 3. [[BUG] Code blocks rendered as inline code without syntax highlighting in VSCode extension #12045](https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/12045) This issue will be automatically closed as a duplicate in 3 days. If your issue is a duplicate, please close it and 👍 the existing issue instead To prevent auto-closure, add a comment or 👎 this comment 🤖 Generated with Claude Code

👎

It's pointless to refer to issues that were closed without good reason.

danielboxer · 2 months ago

I would really like this feature as well, similar to how in the claude code cli it has syntax highlighting.

ralphwest1 · 2 months ago

please consider adding

austinmw · 1 month ago

how does this not have syntax highlighting yet..

mrsylvestre · 1 month ago

Please do it, coders yearns for coloured code snippets!

peshekhanov · 1 month ago

Well, this is disgusting. So much time has passed, but the developers absolutely don't care about this problem, which their competitor solved long ago. Maybe it's time to cancel the subscription.

Deluvio · 1 month ago

still relevant in the current version (2.1.220)

jack-rush-vessev · 23 days ago

Please fix this. It's infuriating that copilot chat has this basic feature working and this extension doesn't

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