Dev Toolbox: Your All-In-One Text Helper Extension For VS Code

Case conversion for variables, classes, CSS, and API fields

Dev Toolbox can convert selected text between many programming case styles:

• camelCase
• PascalCase
• snake_case
• SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE
• kebab-case
• train-case
• flatcase
• plain UPPERCASE and lowercase

Example scenarios:

• You rename a JavaScript variable from userId to USER_ID in an environment file.
• You convert a CSS class from hero-section to heroSection while porting to a JS object style.
• You match an API field name that must be snake_case in JSON but camelCase in code.
• You standardize constant names across a codebase.

Instead of hand-editing every occurrence, you select the text and run the appropriate Dev Toolbox command. The extension applies consistent rules, so you avoid subtle naming differences.

Because this all happens inside the editor, you can combine it with multi-cursor editing, search and replace, or regular expressions in VS Code. That gives you a simple but powerful refactor workflow.

Locale-aware case conversion for multilingual projects

Case conversion is not the same in every language. Some characters have special rules that simple toUpperCase and toLowerCase do not handle correctly.

Dev Toolbox uses locale-aware case conversion under the hood via toLocaleLowerCase and toLocaleUpperCase. You can pass optional locale parameters, and the extension falls back safely when a specific locale is not available.

This matters when:

• You work on internationalized websites or applications.
• You maintain content in languages with special casing rules.
• You generate URLs or labels that must respect local language rules.

For example, a translation team may maintain keys in one case style, and you need to adapt them for display or for route slugs. Locale-aware behavior reduces surprises and keeps text consistent across languages.

Slugify text for URLs, docs, and filenames

Dev Toolbox includes a slugify command that turns arbitrary text into a URL-safe, file-safe slug. It:

• Removes diacritics and special characters.
• Normalizes whitespace.
• Replaces spaces with hyphens.
• Tries to preserve file extensions correctly.

Typical uses:

• Generating blog post slugs from a title.
• Creating documentation URLs from headings.
• Preparing safe filenames from user input or ticket titles.
• Normalizing section anchors in Markdown.

For example, you select "Refactor: Clean up user onboarding flow" and run the slugify command. Dev Toolbox produces a clean slug like refactor-clean-up-user-onboarding-flow that you can paste into routes, markdown IDs, or filenames.

This turns Dev Toolbox into a practical VS Code slug generator that you can rely on during content and documentation work.

Generate GUIDs in code-friendly formats

GUIDs and UUIDs appear in many places:

• Database primary keys and seed data.
• Configuration entries.
• Application IDs and client IDs.
• Attributes in .NET or COM code.

Dev Toolbox generates GUIDs in several convenient formats:

• Raw canonical GUID format, for example: 12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789abc
• Registry style with curly braces: {12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789abc}
• Square bracket Guid attributes, common in attributes or annotations.
• Angle bracket Guid attributes, often used in .NET code.

You can insert a new GUID at the cursor or replace a selection. This is safer than reusing old IDs or copying from an external tool, and you keep your entire GUID workflow inside VS Code.

Sorting lines by length for CSS, configs, and snippets

Sometimes alphabetical order is not what you want. You may prefer to sort by line length, for example:

• Sorting CSS rules by selector length to spot overly complex selectors.
• Ordering validation rules or conditions by complexity.
• Reordering code snippets or messages from shortest to longest for easy scanning.

Dev Toolbox can sort lines by character count:

• Shortest to longest.
• Longest to shortest.
• With stable sorting and optional alphabetical tie-breaking when lengths match.

You select the lines, invoke the "sort by length" command, and Dev Toolbox does the rest. This is difficult to do quickly with standard tools and avoids fragile hacks like counting characters manually.

Cleanup: empty lines, whitespace, and non-printable characters

Messy text sneaks into projects from many sources:

• Copy-paste from emails or office documents.
• Logs pasted into issues.
• Snippets copied from PDFs or forums.

This often introduces:

• Extra empty lines.
• Leading or trailing spaces.
• Invisible non-printable characters that break parsers.

Dev Toolbox includes cleanup helpers to:

• Remove empty lines with configurable behavior, for example collapse multiple blank lines into one.
• Trim leading and trailing whitespace on each selected line.
• Remove non-printable characters that do not belong in source files.

Base64 and URL encoding/decoding inside Dev Toolbox

Dev Toolbox can:

• Encode selected text to Base64.
• Decode Base64 back to plain text.
• Encode text for use in URLs (percent-encoding).
• Decode URL-encoded strings back to readable text.

Use cases:

• Preparing Authorization headers or test payloads for HTTP clients.
• Inspecting encoded tokens or cookies.
• Debugging issues with URL parameters that contain special characters.

You highlight the text in VS Code, run the Dev Toolbox command, and see the encoded or decoded result directly in your file. No external "Base64 encoder for VS Code" extension is required, because Dev Toolbox already covers this.

Locale-aware behavior

As mentioned earlier, case conversion and sorting functions use locale-aware logic when possible. This matters for:

• Correct ordering of names and words with accents.
• Proper casing in languages with special rules.
• Avoiding subtle bugs in string handling.

When you sort translation keys or clean text for localized content, Dev Toolbox respects the language context much better than simple ASCII-based tools.