Preview directly in vscode

[jesseditson]

Hey! I've been using this extension and it has greatly improved my experience with OpenSCAD - I find the main UI useful for when I'm ready to take a model to the slicer, but much prefer VSCode as an IDE.

I'm also pretty constantly trying to move things off my main work machine and into thinner clients, and VSCode server has gone a long way towards allowing me to edit models on my iPad which would be my preferred environment. Even on the big machine though, switching back and forth between apps can be a little cumbersome.

Given the work on https://github.com/seasick/openscad-web-gui, it seems fairly straightforward to run OpenSCAD via wasm or in an external process. I'm curious if you've considered bringing a simple preview (e.g. just a clone of the web-gui repo for now) directly into vscode, in a preview similar to how markdown or image support works.

I haven't done any VSCode extension development, so forgive any bad assumptions here. If my TODO list ever has an opening I'll take a look myself, but for now I figured I'd drop an issue in here to see if there is any prior art or known blockers in case I get around to it!

[Antyos]

Thanks for the kind feedback! Having an OpenSCAD GUI display directly in VS Code has always been on my wishlist, but that would have required someone to port the GUI into wasm--which someone now has! I don't know when I'll get around to being able to implement such a feature, but it's nice to know that the base requirements have been fulfilled.

I'm happy to keep this open as a feature request until it can be properly added.

[wquintal]

I would be interested in implementing this. I'm currently playing a lot with Copilot and OpenSCAD. Having a live preview after each prompt in one window would be awesome.

I will create a POC over the weekend as a starting point.

[Antyos]

That'd be awesome, @wquintal, thanks!

[wquintal]

Hey I've done a POC.

I had a misunderstanding at first, thinking that the WASM OpenSCAD port included a GUI, but it's only used to compile SCAD files to STL, for example.

Something that could already be done for this extension using the executable.
The advantage of using the WASM port would be not to require having OpenSCAD installed to see the preview, but at the cost of speed.
Using the WASM port we should also be able to add support for this in vscode web.

What was needed was an STL viewer and the wrapping code to compile to a SCAD file to STL.
I've looked at openscad-playground and openscad-web-gui and it would not integrate well with vscode.
Better to implement a simple STL viewer.

Here is a demo of what it's looking like, for my example the compilation is done with the openscad executable not with wasm.

vscode-openscad.mp4

I've push my change to #72
I've put most of the logic in lib that are abstracted from vscode if I needed to use somewhere else but if you prefer we can just include them directly.

https://github.com/bascanada/openscad-compiler
https://github.com/bascanada/cad-viewer

I didn't use any of the optimisations in my example for fast render , they are not available on 2021 but they are available in wasm (since it's 2022 currently) , so it probably be better for people to use the wasm lib if they have 2021 on the computer instead of nightly.

  --export-format=binstl \
  --enable=manifold \
  --enable=fast-csg \
  --enable=lazy-union \
  --enable=roof

[jesseditson]

FYI inline preview was also merged into https://github.com/Leathong/openscad-support-vscode (via Leathong/openscad-support-vscode#36), I took a slightly different approach so it might be interesting to compare and contrast. Excited to have some options here! There's still some unsupported stuff in the version I built as well (most glaringly fonts), which I'll probably pick up in the future.

FWIW I do find that while manifold is much faster than OpenSCAD's native renderer, it's still prohibitively slow when compiled to WASM on huge models. But the extension above works for vscode-remote and inline preview for smaller models on iPad, which unblocked what I was working on!

[wquintal]

Good work, it may be worth just using the plugin you linked. Both our implementations are similar. I'll probably finish my implementation for fun.

The 2 features I wanted to implement in the viewer are:

1. Export screen shot of the canvas
2. Add model timeline , allow the option to keep old iteration of the model to compare the current change with the previous

Mainly for LLM integration

And yeah wasm render is slower that is why for me it's more of a backup option if you don't have a recent executable of opencad.

Because i don't know if you have done it but supporting import in wasm is probably a pain ? I import DXF file in some of my projects and other scripts.

[Antyos]

Nice work on this! If I understand correctly, this renders out the file completely using OpenSCAD compiled in WASM and then function as an STL viewer? Are you looking to add more before merging?

[wquintal]

Yes it's using wasm compiler by default, this would work out of the box after plugin installation. But I added a property openScadPanelMode?: 'wasm' | 'native'; to select the native executable if you have it installed, it would be faster and a more current build of openscad.

The extensions send the compiled STL or 3MF file to the viewer to render with three.js. 3MF might be better for preview, with the possibility to see and hide different modules.

And yeah I'll add more to finish in a few days.

[jesseditson]

Import statements work well in wasm, you just have to make sure the paths are available in the FS implementation - emscripten uses a file system api which in node will actually be the native FS by default. In my version I'm running the wasm bin via node (in a fork in the extension host) so everything should work roughly the same as if it were run via a native app.

In fact I was considering (and probably should) taking a similar approach as you and falling back to the slower wasm implementation, selecting a native app as the renderer if it exists.

One more possibly helpful thing is that I added instructions on how to build the wasm version from source to the readme - this would allow you to run the latest version of OpenSCAD in your extension as well!

I hope my work isn't discouraging at all, I believe having multiple implementations can only help us explore more possibilities and is net positive for the community. I'd love to see this ship!

[wquintal]

Thanks for the tips and good instructions for compiling the latest version. I'll try this too; I was too lazy to try compiling it.

Yeah, it can only help to have a better implementation in the end, and I always wanted to work on a VSCode extension.