How can I preview more than one Quarto document in Visual Studio Code?

[cbrnr]

Description

I usually preview Quarto documents in Visual Studio Code using the default "internal" preview, which opens an integrated viewer within the editor. However, this only seems to work for one document at a time. Is there a way to preview two or more Quarto documents simultaneously in VS Code - for example, in separate tabs or split views?

[mcanouil]

Use any tools you like to deploy web server then use Simple Browser: Show command to open the URL.
Of course, you need to execute quarto render from the command line.

[cbrnr]

Thank you, this is exactly what I was looking for!

[cbrnr]

Oops, sorry, that was too fast. It turns out I cannot open more than one instances of the "Simple Browser"...

[mcanouil]

Use localhost with various ports and use your local browser.

(It's really unrelated to Quarto by the way)

edit: a quick search lead to https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=fermelone.simple-browser-multi

[cbrnr]

It's not really related to Quarto, but since the Quarto extension uses the simple browser as its default, I thought it might be possible to have more than one preview open. Seems like this is not the case then (I know how to make it work with custom workarounds, but I was specifically looking for a simple solution that works out of the box). Thanks for clarifying!

[mcanouil]

The quarto preview button uses a terminal connection and does not open multiple ones, so even before the browser issue, you can't use the button to execute several concurrent preview.

Note that doing this will inevitably lead to a huge increase in CPU/memory usage, especially if you watch for the inputs or use save on render.

Even if it's possible to implement something like that in the VSCode extension, the downside (performance issue, higher code base complexity, etc.) outweighs largely your use case.
That is very likely why the VSCode team did not allow multiple instance of the simple browser feature.

[cbrnr]

It is probably a niche use case, but for me it would be very useful to have two (or more) rendered previews in VS Code.

[mcanouil]

Use the extension I've linked. It seems to do what you want (or your local browser possibly on multi-screens setup)