Inflate

Faithful Android layout & drawable XML previews in VS Code — powered by layoutlib, no Android Studio required.

Inflate renders your real Android XML — layouts, drawables, colors, nine-patches — the same way Android's own rendering engine (layoutlib) does, right inside VS Code. It works on native Gradle Android projects and .NET (Xamarin/MAUI) Android projects, because it drives the same engine off the XML/resource-tree conventions both ecosystems share, not off either build system.

• No Android Studio. No Android SDK. No Gradle or MSBuild invocation, ever.
• Faithful. Real inflation, measure, and draw via the same layoutlib Android Studio itself uses — not an approximation.
• Both ecosystems, day one. res/layout/*.xml (Gradle) and Resources/layout/*.axml (.NET) are both first-class.
• Light/dark, device, density, orientation. Preview any config combination from a toolbar, no manifest edits.

Install

1. Install the Inflate extension from the VS Code Marketplace (or a .vsix — see CONTRIBUTING.md for building one yourself).
2. Make sure a JDK 17 or newer is on your machine (Android Studio's bundled JBR, Microsoft OpenJDK, Homebrew/SDKMAN's openjdk, or any standard JDK install all work). Inflate finds it automatically — it never downloads or bundles a JVM itself.
3. Open a workspace containing an Android layout, drawable, or color XML file.

First run

The first time you preview anything, Inflate needs a one-time download of the pinned rendering engine (layoutlib + the bundled androidx/Material libraries) from Google's Maven repository — about 170 MB, shown with progress in the preview panel. This only happens once per engine version; after that, and with the network off entirely, previews keep working (offline-first after first run — see docs/troubleshooting.md if the download fails partway).

If Inflate can't find a compatible JDK, it shows a guided setup message with a download link and a "re-check" action instead — it never tries to download or manage a JVM for you (see AD-003).

Quickstart

1. Open any file under res/layout/, res/drawable/, Resources/layout/, or Resources/drawable/ (.xml or .axml).
2. Right-click → Inflate: Open Preview (or Cmd+P → Inflate: Open Preview).
3. Edit and save — the preview updates in place, without stealing focus from your editor.
4. Use the toolbar to flip day/night, change device/density/orientation, or (for drawables) pick a state (pressed, checked, disabled, …) and inspect it against the checkerboard stage — or drag the preview's edges to try arbitrary sizes.

Commands

Command	What it does
Inflate: Open Preview	Opens (or reveals) the preview panel for the active/selected XML file.
Inflate: Refresh Preview	Re-renders the active preview from the editor's current (possibly unsaved) buffer.
Inflate: Doctor	Reports detected JDK, engine cache state, host status, resolved resource roots, and the last render's timings — the first thing to check when something looks wrong.
Inflate: Clear Engine Cache	Deletes the cached engine artifacts (forces a fresh download + verification next time a preview is opened).
Inflate: Restart Render Host	Manually restarts the render host process (needed after 4 crashes in 5 minutes trips the auto-restart limit — see docs/troubleshooting.md).

Settings

Setting	Default	What it controls
inflate.javaHome	(unset)	Absolute path to a JDK install, overriding auto-detection (JAVA_HOME > PATH > platform-standard locations).
inflate.resourceRoots	[]	Extra resource-root directories to merge in, for project layouts the automatic module/source-set discovery doesn't find (multi-module or unconventional layouts).
inflate.hostMaxHeap	1024 (MB)	The render host JVM's -Xmx. Raise this if Doctor or a crash message reports an OutOfMemoryError.
inflate.renderTimeoutMs	15000	How long a single render may run before Inflate kills and restarts the host, treating it as a crash.

What's rendered faithfully, and what isn't (yet)

Inflate aims to be complete for v1 across framework views/widgets, the bundled androidx/Material surface, and every drawable type — but it is not 100% pixel-identical to Android Studio in every case. Read docs/limitations.md before relying on a pixel-perfect render — it documents every known divergence (a handful of Material widgets, custom views, data binding, version pinning) plainly, with no overstatement.

Documentation

• docs/troubleshooting.md — no JDK found, offline/download failures, host crashes, and what Inflate: Doctor tells you about each.
• docs/limitations.md — every known fidelity gap and why it exists.
• docs/material-quirks.md — the detailed Material-widget-by-widget rendering catalog referenced from limitations.
• docs/performance.md — measured render latency against the product's targets.
• CONTRIBUTING.md — repo layout, building from source, running the gates, the golden-image corpus.

Privacy

No telemetry. The only network traffic Inflate ever makes is the one-time pinned engine download from dl.google.com (Google's own Maven repository), verified against pinned SHA-256 checksums. Your project files never leave your machine — the render host runs with no project bytecode loaded.

License

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE.