Advanced T4 Template Editor for Visual Studio

T4 Editor enhances the Visual Studio experience for developers working with T4 templates. It delivers smart, responsive features like autocompletion, formatting, and multilevel inclusion, all backed by high-speed performance and tight integration with your existing workflow.

Comprehensive IntelliSense for C#, VB, directives, and included files
Customizable syntax highlighting for clear code and directive visibility
Smart navigation with Go To Definition and multilevel template inclusion
Code outlining for easier readability and structure management
Fast parsing of even large and complex template files
Flexible editor settings for formatting, indentation, and selecting display preferences

Why you need T4 Editor

Working with T4 templates in plain text editors or default Visual Studio support can quickly become frustrating—especially as your templates grow in complexity. T4 Editor eliminates these pain points by delivering a smarter, faster, and fully integrated T4 editing experience inside Visual Studio.

Full IntelliSense support

Get intelligent code completion for C#, Visual Basic, template directives, included files, and referenced assemblies—all right within your template.

Multilevel template inclusion

Easily work with included T4 files—the Editor parses and displays their members in the IntelliSense list, just like in your main file.

Go To Definition navigation

Instantly jump to symbol declarations within the current template or any included files to understand and refactor faster.

Advanced syntax highlighting

Easily distinguish code from plain text and directives with color-coded formatting customizable to your Visual Studio theme.

Code outlining (folding)

Collapse and expand control blocks for a cleaner view and easier navigation when working with large or complex templates.

Performance on large files

Manage files of any size with T4 Editor optimized for speed and capable of handling large, multi-file templates with ease, avoiding lags or slowdowns during editing.

Customizable editing experience

Enable or disable features like word wrap, virtual whitespace, or line numbers. Tailor fonts, colors, and indenting rules to your preferences.

Tight integration with Entity Developer

Unlock powerful T4-based code generation workflows with Entity Developer, using the same robust editing tools for custom ORM templates.

Everything you need for effective T4 template editing

IntelliSense

Devart T4 Editor provides comprehensive IntelliSense, including all Visual Studio C# and Visual Basic IntelliSense features—tooltips, parameter info, code completion. Additionally, it supports a completion list for template directives. T4 Editor IntelliSense lists all available C# classes and members, even those in included template files and in referenced assemblies.

Syntax highlighting

Devart T4 Editor highlights template directives, C# and Visual Basic code, allowing you to easily distinguish text from function calls. Fonts and colors for templates can be customized like in any other Visual Studio code editor.

Go To

Devart T4 Editor allows you to navigate to definitions and declarations of objects and members if they are present in the template file or included files.

Including and navigating multilevel T4 templates in Devart T4 Editor

Inclusion

Devart T4 Editor supports multilevel template inclusion. All classes from included templates are available in IntelliSense, and you can navigate to them with the Go To menu commands.

Outlining

Devart T4 Editor supports fast and convenient code outlining (folding). This ability to hide or display T4 control blocks makes it easier to understand and edit T4 templates.

Editor customization

You can enable or disable IntelliSense, word wrapping, virtual whitespace, line numbers, etc. Fonts and colors for syntax highlighting can also be changed.

Indenting

Devart T4 Editor provides customizable and intelligent indenting. You don't need to add spaces or tab characters manually.

Code formatting

Devart T4 Editor allows you to format templates automatically.

High-performance editing and parsing of large T4 templates in Devart T4 Editor

Support for large templates

Devart T4 Editor quickly parses even large template files with lots of included files. It provides high performance when parsing and editing templates.

Integration with our ORM designer

T4 Editor is also available as part of Entity Developer, a powerful modeling and code generation tool for EF Core, Entity Framework, NHibernate, LINQConnect, and LINQ to SQL.

Entity Developer provides advanced code generation via T4 templates. It supports specifying various properties of a template, such as its name, type, generation paths, and others, within the template itself. You can even add your own properties to templates to make the code generation more flexible.

Entity Developer comes with several predefined templates: POCO, Self-Tracking, DbContext, and Fluent mapping templates for Entity Framework, NHibernate, and LINQ to SQL. These templates are quality-designed and thoroughly tested.

Learn more