Is there a cache of VSCT(s) that Visual Studio maintains & that extensions can access/read?

[dubeg]

I'm replicating SublimeText's command palette for Visual Studio, and as such I want to show a list of commands.

However, the easiest way to list commands will only return a command's ID string, eg. Edit.FormatDocument. I implemented a manual list of command metadata to display a friendly text & icon per command, but that's quite annoying to build.

I'm investigating the nuclear option, which is parsing the VSCT out of every VS packages registered to build the commands list, but I don't really want to do that from within an extension.

Which leads me to think that surely Visual Studio maintains such a list itself, or at least a cache of VSCT(s) somewhere. Would anyone be aware of it?

[reduckted]

It's not exactly what you're looking for, but @madskristensen has an extension that does something similar, and he uses the localized command name and converts it to "words". So I guess it's not possible to get that information via the APIs.

https://github.com/madskristensen/KeyboardHero/blob/f956b3e066d6dc9290ca9b67e256d6906d24f158/src/ShortcutExtractor.cs#L53

[dubeg]

Thanks @reduckted . I found via VSShortcutsManager that there is indeed a cache of ctmenus, devenv.CTM, but it's still in a (compressed?) binary form and I didn't succeed in parsing it in my extension.

I tried decompiling VS's various dlls, and I found a "private" service used by the new code/feature search window that I can use: IVsFastFetchCommands.

Out of curiosity, I found various IVs interfaces that don't have a corresponding SVs, why is that? I couldn't find a way to instantiate them. Are they used internally in the COM dlls?

[RobertvanderHulst]

Sometimes a single service exposes many interfaces. In that case, there will be no SV for the interface.
Do you have an example of this?

[dubeg]

I mean for internal IVs, such as those listed in msenv100p. Some of them looked interesting to me, eg. IVsCommandTableService, but I can't access them :/