Patching

Vencord includes a couple of cool things for patching.

The \i placeholder

You may have already seen this during your adventures in trying to work out how plugins work, but we have a custom regex placeholder called \i. This stands for identifier, and will match any minified identifiers in Discord’s module source code. It’s equivalent to [A-Za-z_$][\w$]*.

For a live example, take the ColorSighted plugin:

export default definePlugin({
    name: "ColorSighted",
    description: "Removes the colorblind-friendly icons from statuses, just like 2015-2017 Discord",
    authors: [Devs.lewisakura],
    patches: [
        {
            find: "Masks.STATUS_ONLINE",
            replacement: {
                match: /Masks\.STATUS_(?:IDLE|DND|STREAMING|OFFLINE)/g,
                replace: "Masks.STATUS_ONLINE"
            }
        },
        {
            find: ".AVATAR_STATUS_MOBILE_16;",
            replacement: {
                match: /(?<=fromIsMobile:\i=!0,.+?)status:(\i)/,
                // Rename field to force it to always use "online"
                replace: 'status_$:$1="online"'
            }
        }
    ]
});

Let’s take a closer look at the second patch:

{
    find: ".AVATAR_STATUS_MOBILE_16;",
    replacement: {
        match: /(?<=fromIsMobile:\i=!0,.+?)status:(\i)/,
        // Rename field to force it to always use "online"
        replace: 'status_$:$1="online"'
    }
}

Here, we’re using \i twice to match an identifier in a lookback, and then again to capture an identifier to use in the replacement later. This demonstrates two things: we can use this placeholder for matching and for capturing Discord’s mangled variable names. This is highly useful for patches that need to work with these variables, and saves you from having to rewrite the same regex over and over.

pencil icon