An 8-bit style image displays a basic computer screen set at a small square size. On screen are geometric icons: a script file with a play button, a file explorer showing several files and folders, and one file—labeled as .gitignore—stands out with a highlight. The palette uses only five businesslike colors; the graphics are flat, minimal, and use simple shapes, with no background, shading, or words. Everything is arranged for a tidy, iconic appearance.

Running Scripts

The GenAIScript extension for Visual Studio Code provides a convenient way to run scripts directly from the editor.

There are mostly two ways of running scripts:

running a script “directly”. This scenario is useful when debugging a script or for a script that does not require any input files.
running a script from input files or folders. This scenario is useful when you want to run a script on multiple files or folders.

Running Scripts directly

open a GenAIScript file in the editor
right-click in the editor and select Run GenAIScript* form the content menu
or click on on the Run GenAIScript icon in the top right corner of the editor

This will start the script execution and use the default input files specify in the script files field.

script({
    files: "...",
})

This mode is useful when developing script or for scripts that do not require any input files.

Running Scripts from input files or folders

This mode allows to run scripts on any combination of files and folders, which will populate env.files.

From the explorer window:

select any files or folders in the explorer. You can use the Ctrl or Shift key to select multiple files or folders.
right-click and select Run GenAIScript from the context menu

From an editor

open an file in the editor (not a GenAIScript file)
right-click and select Run GenAIScript from the context menu

Using the selected text in your script

Whenever you launch a script, GenAIScript will grab the selected text in the active text editor and store in the editor.selectedText variable.

const text = env.vars["editor.selectedText"]

If value will be undefined if you run your script from the command line, so you should handle that case in your script.

.gitignore rules

GenAIScript tries to respect the top-level .gitignore rules in the project workspace (it ignores nested .gitignore files). This means that if you have a .gitignore file in your project, GenAIScript will ignore any files or folders that are ignored by Git.

There are exceptions to this rule:

if you run Run GenAIScript on individual files, those files are not filtered by .gitignore since you explicitly chose them. Folders are always filtered.
if you specify ---ignore-git-ignore in the command line, GenAIScript will ignore the .gitignore file and run the script on all files and folders.