Paths-LE: Zero Hassle Path Extraction

Pull every file path out of the current file in one keystroke
JavaScript, TypeScript, JSON, YAML, HTML, CSS, TOML, CSV and Environment files — and every other file, by text scan

Useful? A star or rating is how other developers find it — ★ GitHub · ★ Open VSX · ★ Marketplace

What it does

Open a file, press Ctrl+Alt+P (Cmd+Alt+P on Mac), and every file path in the document lands in a new editor — deduplicate and sort it from there. Works in VS Code and in VS Code–based editors like Cursor and VSCodium (installable from Open VSX).

• Import analysis — extract local imports from JS/TS, including multi-line import statements; npm package names are filtered out
• Asset auditing — every src, href, srcset, url(), and @import in HTML/CSS
• Config review — path-like values from JSON/JSONC, YAML, TOML, CSV, and .env files
• Anything else — Python, Go, Markdown, XML, a Dockerfile: no parser, so a text scan finds quoted filenames and any run carrying a path separator

Install

Use it from an AI agent

The same engine runs as an MCP server, so an agent can call it directly instead of you running a command.

extract_paths(content, format?, filename?, dedupe?, maxResults?)

Returns every path classified as file, relative, absolute or url, with its 1-based line and column. Paths are reported exactly as written — nothing is resolved against a workspace or touched on disk.

The server takes content and returns data — it reads no files and makes no network requests of its own. Published as paths-le-mcp on npm and as io.github.nolindnaidoo/paths-le in the MCP registry.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "paths-le": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "paths-le-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

npm install -g paths-le-mcp

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "paths-le": { "command": "paths-le-mcp" }
  }
}

echo '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/list"}' | npx -y paths-le-mcp

The CLI

The same extraction runs from a terminal or an agent loop: a Rust CLI in crate/ of this repository, sharing one corpus with the extension — crate/fixtures/ — so CI fails if the two ever read a document differently.

It also does the half an editor cannot: resolve what it found against the filesystem it is standing in. Every path gets a verdict — exists, missing, escapes the audited tree, non-canonical, or a symlink with its target named.

paths-le .                    # audit a tree; JSON on stdout, summary on stderr
paths-le --strict .           # count sloppily-written paths too
paths-le --no-resolve src/    # just list what is written, touch nothing
paths-le mcp                  # the same audit over MCP on stdio

The exit code is the answer: 0 clear · 1 findings · 2 the question was malformed — so paths-le --strict . is a CI step as it stands.

Supported formats

Positions are real source positions for JS/TS, JSON/JSONC, HTML, CSS and the text scan (exact line and column of the path); TOML and YAML positions are located in the source text and can be approximate for repeated identical values; CSV positions are row/cell coordinates. Version strings (1.8.1) and IP addresses are never treated as paths, and data:/javascript: URLs are excluded from HTML/CSS extraction. Known limitation: bare domains like example.com are indistinguishable from filenames and are extracted.

The text scan claims a bare name.ext only inside quotes. os.path in a Python file and main.py are the same shape, and no rule short of a dictionary separates them — but source quotes its filenames and does not quote its attribute access, so the quoting does. A YAML scalar holding a shell command (run: node ./scripts/build.js) is one token containing spaces, so no path is claimed from it, exactly as in JSON and TOML.

Commands

Settings

Languages

Twelve languages besides English:

German · Spanish · French · Indonesian · Italian · Japanese · Korean · Portuguese (Brazil) · Russian · Ukrainian · Vietnamese · Chinese (Simplified)