LDraw is an open standard for LEGO® CAD software. It is based on a hierarchy of elements describing primitive shapes up to complex LEGO models and scenes.

Syntax Highlighting

This extension provides convenient syntax highlighting for working with LDraw files. It recognizes all LDraw keywords and some keywords/meta-commands from other tools such as LPub and LSynth. Lines that contain primitives (line types 1-5) have elements such as colour, coordinates, and matrix coefficients indiviually highlighted into groups for easy visual parsing.

Features

special highlights for groups of 3D coordinate values, hex values, and quoted strings
support for officially recognized // double slash comment lines
different highlights for recognized keywords vs. !META commands
FILE/NOFILE highlighted differently to help spot model boundaries in a file

Installation

Copy the LDraw extension to the VSCode extension directory:

Windows: %USERPROFILE%\.vscode\extensions
macOS/Linux: $HOME/.vscode/extensions

    $ git clone https://github.com/michaelgale/ldraw-vscode.git
    $ cp -R ldraw-vscode/ ~/.vscode/extensions/ldraw-vscode

Restart VSCode and the extension should run automatically everytime you open a file with .ldr, .dat or .mpd file extension.

References

LDraw.org - Official maintainer of the LDraw file format specification and the LDraw official part library.

Lego CAD Tools

Bricklink stud.io new and modern design tool designed and maintained by Bricklink
LeoCAD cross platform tool
MLCAD for Windows
Bricksmith for macOS by Allen Smith (no longer maintained)
LDView real-time 3D viewer for LDraw models

LPub Instructions Tools

Original LPub publishing tool by Kevin Clague
LPub3D successor to LPub by Trevor Sandy
Manual for Legacy LPub 4 tool (last version by Kevin Clague)

Authors

ldraw-vscode was written by Michael Gale