ECA vscode

ECA (Editor Code Assistant) Vscode is an AI-powered pair-programming client for VsCode. It connects to an external eca server process to provide interactive chat, code suggestions, context management and more.

For more details about ECA, features and configuration, check ECA server.

This extension will auto download eca and manage the process.

Tips

Commands

• eca.chat.addContextToSystemPrompt: Add context to system prompt in chat in a DWIM (do what I mean) manner.
• eca.chat.rewrite: Rewrite a piece of code given a prompt.
• eca.inlineChat.prompt: Ask ECA from any file, streaming the answer into a comment thread at the cursor/selection, backed by a regular chat. On first use you can fork an existing chat to reuse its history; the chat sticks to the file for follow-ups. Follow-up, stop and tool call approvals happen in the thread.
• eca.inlineChat.promptSelecting: Same as above but always re-asks which chat to use.

Settings

• eca.serverPath: Custom server path, if not set it will download latest server from https://github.com/editor-code-assistant/eca
• eca.serverArgs: Extra server args used when starting eca server.
• eca.sendProcessId: Whether to send the VS Code process ID to the server so it exits when the editor does (default true). Disable it when sandboxing, see below.

Sandboxing

You can run the eca server under any sandbox tool (docker, podman, bubblewrap, etc.) by pointing eca.serverPath to a wrapper script that starts the server inside the sandbox. The server is started with the first workspace folder as working directory, so the wrapper can rely on $PWD being the project (e.g. to mount it in a container). Check the sandboxing docs for ready-to-use wrappers.

When the sandbox hides or remaps the host PID (containers), also disable eca.sendProcessId, otherwise the server's parent-process watchdog can't see the PID and shuts down right after startup:

{
  "eca.serverPath": "/home/you/.local/bin/eca-sandboxed",
  "eca.sendProcessId": false
}

Troubleshooting

Check troubleshooting docs section.

Development

Make sure that you have the eca-webview submodule cloned. To download it, you can run:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Run locally

npm run dev:gui

This will start Vite dev server on http://localhost:5173, so any changes will be updated on the vscode live.

then start vscode on debug mode, open this project in vscode and hit F5 (Debug), this should open a new vscode extension with this plugin running.

WARN: To run the task from VsCode, need to install the esbuild Problem Matchers extension.