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Shader Explorer

Shader Explorer lets you browse, search, and preview all shader files in your workspace.

Opening

The Shader Explorer is available in two forms — the sidebar for persistent browsing, and the full panel for focused exploration.

  • Sidebar — click the Shader Studio icon in the VS Code activity bar. The explorer appears as a sidebar view you can keep open alongside your editor.
  • Full panel — open the toolbar menu and choose Shader Explorer, or run Shader Studio: Open Shader Explorer from the command palette.

Shader explorer sidebar

State (search, sort, page, card size) persists independently for each view.

Browsing and Navigation

Each shader in your workspace appears as a card showing a live-rendered thumbnail preview, the shader filename, and its last-modified date.

  • Click a card to open the shader file in the editor and refresh its thumbnail preview.
  • Right-click a card to open a context menu with options to open the shader, open its config, or delete it.
  • Open files on select — when enabled, clicking a card opens the shader file in the editor. Toggle this off in the options panel if you prefer to browse thumbnails without switching files.

Search and Sort

  • Search — type in the search bar to filter shaders by name, path, or shader source text (case-insensitive). Name matches are shown before path and source-text matches. Multiple terms are combined, quoted phrases match exactly, and terms prefixed with - are excluded, e.g. ray sphere -buffer or "ray march".
  • Sort by — dropdown with options:
    • Name — alphabetical A–Z
    • Updated — most recently modified first
    • Created — newest first
  • Sort order — toggle button to switch ascending/descending

Display Options

Click the options button to expand the display settings panel:

  • Card size — slider (100–1000px width) to control how large shader cards appear. Only available in grid layout mode.
  • Layout — toggle between grid (cards in a responsive grid) and row (cards in a single-column list with larger thumbnails).
  • Page size — dropdown to show 10, 20, 30, 50, or 100 shaders per page.
  • Hide failed — checkbox to hide shaders that failed to compile or render.
  • Open files on select — checkbox to control whether clicking a card opens the file in the editor.

Refresh

Click the refresh button in the toolbar to re-scan the workspace for shaders and regenerate all thumbnails. There is a short rendering delay (~3 seconds) while thumbnails are captured.

Clicking an individual shader card also refreshes that shader's thumbnail — useful after editing a shader to update its preview in the explorer.

File Management

  • New shader — click the + button in the toolbar to create a new shader file from a template.
  • Delete shader — right-click a card and choose Delete to move the shader file to the trash. If the shader has dependent buffer pass files, a confirmation dialog warns you before deleting.

Next

Code Snippets — insert bundled shader code through native VS Code completion