I just released v0.6 of SassyStudio and wanted to give a progress update on what is coming up next and where I plan on taking things.

The latest version of SassyStudio ended up being a lot more work than I had anticipated, but now that it is done I'm extremely excited about what is coming up next for the project. For the next few releases I will be focuessing primarily on intellisense and expanding on what was added in v0.6.

Intellisense falls into three categories in Visual Studio:

  • Completion - The list of possible values
  • Quick Info - Information about a specific completion value
  • Signatures - Information about a method call (such as arguments and the order they appear)

In v0.6 I just shipped the initial support for completion which adds completion support for keywords, variables, functions, and mixins. In future releases I will continue to expand the scope of completions that are supported, but the core of what SCSS offers should have decent completion support at this time. Quick Info and Signatures will be coming, but likely not for a few releases.

Now, lets lay out what you can expect to see in the next few releases.

v0.7 - CSS Intellisense Released

Ultimately, v0.6 took so long because I ended up not being able to extend the current CSS editor and had to recreate it on my own and that means I'll end up having to add the CSS intellisense on my own as well. However, I can use the same source information that the regular CSS editor uses since it's all stored in some XML files on the file system.

Since I don't have to compile a list of all CSS properties and elements and should be able to use the schema files already included in Visual Studio, I'm cautiosly optimistic that v0.7 may be able to be released before the end of the month.

v0.8 - SCSS Intellisense Released

Once we have support for basic CSS intellisense, I will be able to introduce intellisense into SCSS specific contexts like nested properties. For instance, when we have some SCSS code like .panel { font: { family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; } }, we can limit completion values in the font property block to the font- namespace like family, weight, etc.

As of right now, I'm not sure how difficult this would be, but I am thinking it should be simple and we can expect that v0.8 will quickly follow v0.7.

v0.9 - Classic SASS support

By the time that v0.9 rolls around, I am hoping that I will have definitively determined how to easily add support for .sass files for those who are still using them. Now, SASS and SCSS are so similar that (as far as I am aware of right now), I should be able to just have my new tokenizer emit fake curly brace tokens when the indentation level changes. If not, then I will just end up having to split the tokenizer into two and share what I can, but the unique parts should be pretty small and thus I am again cautiously optimistic that this should be a fairly simple and quick release.

v1.0 - Advanced Function Intellisense

For the 1.0 release I want to finally get the intellisense around functions to be on par with what you see in other first class languages in Visual Studio. For 1.0 I will add support for viewing the function "signature" so that you can see the arguments that the function is expecting for both system functiona and custom functions. With this will also come general completion support for "named arguments" when calling a function (i.e. rgb($r: 255, $g: 255, $b: 255)) and likely some warnings if your function call is invalid.

Infinity and beyond

That gives you an overview of what to expect out of the next few releases, but beyond that is somewhat in flux at this point. There's so much more to do with intellisense in addition to what I have laid out here but they are much more complex (i.e. type inference on variables) that I felt that what I laid out in the roadmap will be much more beneficial to the user.

If you have any feedback on what you would like to see in SassyStudio, feel free to leave a comment here or enter it as an issue on GitHub.