How to navigate in DocumentView when developing extensions for VS 2022?

[StanislavKoncebovski]

Mads Kristensen gave an enlightening explanation how to insert a GUID at a current caret position. But literally nowhere was I able to find a hint to how to insert a text at a different defined position in the document, e.g. at the very beginning. I failed to find any comprehensible documentation or tutorial to this topic. I guess, a possibility to navigate must be present, but very well hidden from a layman like myself. I spent a couple of hours trying to understand the classes, interfaces, etc. responsible for this episode by brute debugging, but, so far, failed, and I hope that someone in this universe could provide some explanation. TIA!

[reduckted]

The ITextBuffer allows you to insert text at arbitrary points. You can also use its CurrentSnapshot property to get the length of the document and the lines in the document.

Here are some examples.

DocumentView document = await VS.Documents.GetActiveDocumentViewAsync();

// Insert at the start of the document.
document.TextBuffer.Insert(0, "I'm at the start.");

// Insert at the end of the document.
int end = document.TextBuffer.CurrentSnapshot.Length;
document.TextBuffer.Insert(end, "I'm at the end.");

// Inserting at the start of the second line.
ITextSnapshotLine secondLine = document.TextBuffer.CurrentSnapshot.GetLineFromLineNumber(1);
document.TextBuffer.Insert(secondLine.Start, "Now I am the second line\n.");

[StanislavKoncebovski]

Thanks a lot! I tested it, and it works!
Stan

[StanislavKoncebovski]

BTW, is there an API documentation? I would be thankful for a hint!

[reduckted]

You can find the API here: https://docs.microsoft.com/dotnet/api/microsoft.visualstudio.text.itextbuffer

There's also a good overview of the whole editor here: https://docs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/extensibility/inside-the-editor

[StanislavKoncebovski]

Thanks a lot Dave!