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What is SongTxt?

It's a Visual Studio Code extension that improves the experience around editing text file versions of songs including lyrics, chords, and guitar tabs. If you've ever dealt with chord files or guitar tabs like the ones found on Ultimate Guitar, then you may want to give SongTxt a try.

Install SongTxt

You can either get it directly from the Visual Studio Marketplace or follow these instructions to install it manually:

1. Download and install Visual Studio Code (it's free) from here.
2. Launch VS Code
3. Hit Ctrl+Shift+X (Windows) or Cmd+Shift+X (Mac) to open the Extensions side bar
4. Search for SongTxt
5. Click Install
6. Create or open a .txt file (e.g., song.txt) and transcribe away

What does it look like?

Features

Syntax highlighting/colorization

• Chord names above lyrics
• Section headers (e.g., [Verse], [Chorus], [Bridge])
• Tunings in guitar tablature
• Comments (text in parentheses)

Code snippets for inserting guitar tablature sections

• Instead of dealing with the pain of manually creating tablature sections, you can have SongTxt automatically insert them into your file for you. To do so, just move the caret to where you want to insert the tabs in the file, press Ctrl+Space, and then type in -6 to see a list of six string tunings to pick from. Highlight the one you want (or click on it) and you should get a nice blank section of tablature to work with. Oh, if you play a seven-string, type in -7 instead.

Feature requests or bug reports

If you run into any problems or have ideas for features, please submit an Issue.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Coming soon.