Sticky Scroll

My main project during my internship in the VS Code team has been to implement the sticky scroll feature. Sticky scroll pins the enclosing scopes — such as functions, classes, loops, and conditional blocks — to the top of the editor as you scroll through a file. This gives you persistent context about where you are in the code without having to scroll back up. For example, when reading through a deeply nested function, the class name, method signature, and enclosing if or for blocks remain visible as sticky headers at the top of the viewport. As you scroll past the end of a scope, its sticky line smoothly transitions out and is replaced by the next relevant scope. The feature relies on the editor’s syntax tree (provided by TextMate grammars, Tree-sitter, or the Language Server Protocol’s folding ranges) to determine scope boundaries and nesting depth.