This is the official Visual Studio Code (and Cursor) extension for developing smart contracts in the Move language on the Aptos blockchain.

Built from the ground up, it delivers a modern and performant development experience, offering essential features like semantic highlighting, real-time diagnostics, auto-formatting and seamless integration with the rest of the Aptos toolchain - all designed to help developers build and test Move contracts with ease and confidence.

Actively maintained by the Aptos team, this extension is designed to evolve alongside the Move language and supports both developers who are new to Move, and those building more complex applications.

• Semantic Highlighting
• Go to Definition
• Find All References & Symbol Renaming
• Type and Documentation on Hover
• Contextual Auto-Completion
• Inlay Hints for Types and Function Parameters

• Real-Time Diagnostics
• Code suggestions
• movefmt Integration

• Run #[test] functions
• Check modules and functions with Move Prover

We publish releases both on VSCode Marketplace and OpenVSX.

We also publish nightly pre-releases, which are built from main branch every night. To use those, select Switch to Pre-Release Version from your editor’s Extensions View.

Clone the repo, then run:

cargo run -p xtask -- install --server --client

(or just cargo xtask install --server --client, see https://github.com/matklad/cargo-xtask)

The command builds move-on-aptos.vsix extension file and installs it into your VSCode. Then it runs cargo install to build and install language server.

Put

"move-on-aptos.server.path": "~/.cargo/bin/aptos-language-server",

to your settings.json to point the extension to your locally built language server.

If you use https://www.cursor.com/ AI editor, you need to do a bit more work.

Run the installation command above. The result would be a ./editors/code/move-on-aptos.vsix vscode extension package. Then install it from the editor using the "Install from VSIX..." command.

This extension provides configurations through VSCode’s configuration settings. All configurations are under move-on-aptos.*.

LSP is somewhat limited in what it can actually do, so some of the settings need to be specified manually.

Add the following to your settings.json:

    "files.readonlyInclude": {
        "**/build/*/sources/**/*.move": true,
        "**/.move/**/*.move": true,
    }

    "[move]": {
        "editor.wordSeparators": "`~!@#$%^&*()-=+[{]}\\|;:'\",.<>/?bx",
    },

A bunch of symbols in the config value are the defaults, we’re adding b and x symbols for the string prefixes.

    {
        "key": "ctrl+alt+o",
        "command": "move-on-aptos.organizeImports",
        "when": "editorTextFocus && !editorReadonly"
    }

Extension provides a number of diagnostics, from hard errors like “unresolved reference” to style lints. Some of those might be less useful than others for different coding styles, so there’s an escape hatch to disable those:

{
    "move-on-aptos.diagnostics.disabled": [],
}

where values are diagnostic codes from the error messages, like unused-variable here:

Type hints for the let statements and lambda parameters are supported.

module 0x1::m {
    fun main() {
        let a/*: integer*/ = 1;
        let f: |u8| u8 = |e/*: u8*/| e;
    }
}

To disable those, use:

{
    "move-on-aptos.inlayHints.typeHints.enable": false,
}

Specify a path to the movefmt executable and extra args (like a --config-path) if necessary:

{
    "move-on-aptos.movefmt.path": "~/code/movefmt/target/release/movefmt",
    "move-on-aptos.movefmt.extraArgs": [],
}

Formatting on Save can be enabled in VSCode with

{
    "editor.formatOnSave": true,
}

It’s useful to enable INFO logging level, it’s not very chatty and could provide with a valuable information to debug:

    "move-on-aptos.server.extraEnv": { "RA_LOG": "info" },

Run server diagnostics on the file (or package directory). If --apply-fixes is provided, automatically applies available autofixes:

See available diagnostics with auto-fixes

  $ aptos-language-server diagnostics --apply-fixes replace-with-method-call ./aptos-stdlib/sources/cryptography/keyless.move
processing package 'aptos-stdlib', file: /home/mkurnikov/code/aptos-core/aptos-move/framework/aptos-stdlib/sources/cryptography/keyless.move
note[replace-with-method-call]: Can be replaced with method call
   ┌─ /home/mkurnikov/code/aptos-core/aptos-move/framework/aptos-stdlib/sources/cryptography/keyless.move:67:17
   │
67 │         assert!(string::bytes(&iss).length() <= MAX_ISSUER_UTF8_BYTES_LENGTH, error::invalid_argument(E_INVALID_ISSUER_UTF8_BYTES_LENGTH));
   │                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
   │
   ┌─ /home/mkurnikov/code/aptos-core/aptos-move/framework/aptos-stdlib/sources/cryptography/keyless.move:67:17
   │
67 │         assert!(iss.bytes().length() <= MAX_ISSUER_UTF8_BYTES_LENGTH, error::invalid_argument(E_INVALID_ISSUER_UTF8_BYTES_LENGTH));
   │                 ^^^^^^^^^^^ after fix

Code: replace-with-method-call

Code: replace-with-compound-expr

Code: replace-with-index-expr

Detects expressions of form *vector::borrow(&some_vector, index) and *some_vector.borrow(index), which can be converted to some_vector[index].

Code: use-struct-lit-field-shorthand, use-struct-pat-field-shorthand, use-schema-lit-field-shorthand

Detects struct literal fields which could be written in shorthand form.

Code: remove-redundant-cast

Detects expressions like number as u8, where number is already of type it’s being casted to.

Code: rename-with-underscore-prefix

Prefixes unused variable with _.

• More error highlighting:

  • Implement more errors from the Aptos Move compiler (like ability checking)
  • Implement lints from the aptos move lint with extension-provided quickfixes.

• Working with imports:

  • Detect unused imports and remove them with “Organize Imports” VSCode feature.
  • Show completion items not imported in the current module, create use statements for those automatically.

• Integration with the aptos-cli commands: compile packages, publishing modules and executing transactions.

• Move.toml support.

• AI integration (via MCP server).