Nunjucks Settings for VS Code

Syntax Highlighter, Formatter, and Emmet

2 min readMar 17, 2021

Nunjucks?

Nunjucks is a templating language for JavaScript. One of its use-case is to template HTML files. The following is an example from its official docs.

var items = [{ title: “foo”, id: 1 }, { title: “bar”, id: 2}];
<h1>Posts</h1>
<ul>
  {% for item in items %}
    <li>{{ item.title }}</li>
  {% else %}
    <li>This would display if the 'item' collection were empty</li>
  {% endfor %}
</ul>

Visual Studio Code!

To effectively edit Nunjucks file(.njk) in VS Code, mulitple extensions are needed. Nunjucks support is not built into VS Code, unlike HTML.

Syntax Highlight

Highlights Nunjucks Code for Better Readability

Nunjucks Code Highlighted According to Syntax

Notice how the following code is color-coded. (e.g. for, else, endfor)

{% for item in items %}
<li>{{ item.title }}</li>
{% else %}
<li>This would display if the ‘item’ collection were empty</li>
{% endfor %}

The extension can be downloaded from here.

Name: Nunjucks
Id: ronnidc.nunjucks
Description: A Nunjucks syntax definition + snippets
Version: 0.3.0
Publisher: ronnidc

Formatter

Formats Nunjucks Code for Better Readability

Nunjucks Code Formatted with Indentation

Notice how the following code is formatted with proper indentation.

{% for item in items %}
  <li>{{ item.title }}</li>
{% else %}
  <li>This would display if the ‘item’ collection were empty</li>
{% endfor %}

The extension can be downloaded from here.

Name: Nunjucks Template Formatter
Id: okitavera.vscode-nunjucks-formatter
Description: Formatter for Nunjucks template
Version: 0.1.3
Publisher: Nanda Okitavera

The above extension allows frontmatter in-front of nunjucks file.

---
items
  - title: foo
    id: 1
  - title: bar
    id: 2
---

Emmet (IntelliSense)

Auto-Completes HTML Tags (with Close Tags)

No extension is needed. Instead, Include HTML Emmeting in njk and nunjucks files by modifying VS Code settings on a Project.

@ PROJECT_FOLDER/.vscode/settings.json{
  "html.suggest.html5": true,
  "emmet.includeLanguages": {
    "njk": "html",
    "nunjucks": "html"
  }
}