VSCodium Indent Rainbow extension not working on macOS

24 May 2021

After switching to VSCodium, I found that the popular extension Indent Rainbow no longer works. I figured a way to fix the issue, but I don't think it's a long-term solution. Users will perhaps have to wait for a patch.

The issue seems to be in the build process of the indent-rainbow extension. I could be wrong. But after looking at the VSCodium logs on startup, it outputs this error:

[2021-01-01 12:00:49.094] [exthost] [info] ExtensionService#loadCommonJSModule file:///Users/me/.vscode-oss/extensions/oderwat.indent-rainbow-7.5.0/out/extension
[2021-01-01 12:00:49.098] [exthost] [error] Activating extension oderwat.indent-rainbow failed due to an error:
[2021-05-23 12:00:49.098] [exthost] [error] Error: Cannot find module '/Users/me/.vscode-oss/extensions/oderwat.indent-rainbow-7.5.0/out/extension'

VSCodium is looking for the extension.js file at the location ~/.vscode-oss/extensions/oderwat.indent-rainbow-7.5.0/out/ but it seems that the JS file wasn't placed there during the build process. The file it's looking for actually lives in ~/.vscode-oss/extensions/oderwat.indent-rainbow-7.5.0/out/src β€” one level above where it should be. So what we can do is just simply copy the JS file above the src folder:

$ cp ~/.vscode-oss/extensions/oderwat.indent-rainbow-7.5.0/out/src/extension.js ~/.vscode-oss/extensions/oderwat.indent-rainbow-7.5.0/out/extension.js

Don't forget to change the version number based on the indent-rainbow version you installed. Restart VSCodium after.


Jeff Bocala Β© 2021. This portfolio site is built with Next.js.
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