Now that I have custom tasks for building and serving my Hugo site in Visual Studio Code, I wanted to create posts quickly without having to remember the hugo command. So, this is what I did:

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{
	"version": "2.0.0",
	"tasks": [
		{
			"label": "New Post",
			"type": "shell",
			"command": "title=\"${input:title}\" && slug=\"${title// /-}\" && hugo new content/post/${slug,,}/index.md --source ./src",
			"problemMatcher": []
		}
	],
	"inputs": [
		{
			"id": "title",
			"description": "Enter the title of the new post",
			"type": "promptString"
		}
	]
}

The Variable Substitution section of the Visual Studio docs provides information on getting input from the user.

First, I defined the inputs by providing the id, description, and type. Then the most interesting part:

The command:

1

title="${input:title}" && slug="${title// /-}" && hugo new content/post/${slug,,}/index.md --source ./src

does three (3) things using bash:

1. Save the input text into a variable named title

   1	title="${input:title}"

2. Replace spaces in the title variable with dashes and store the output in another variable named slug:

   1	slug="${title// /-}"

3. Execute hugo command to create the content file:

   1	hugo new content/post/${slug,,}/index.md --source ./src

   This last command converts the contents of the slug variable to lowercase. Pretty neat!

So far I’m pretty pleased with my experience with the Hugo static site generator.