I made this when I kept burning through my monthly Copilot allotment and wanted to drop a whole project into a free Gemini or Claude session without copy-pasting twenty files one by one.
It’s a VS Code extension. You point it at your workspace, run Flatten Project to TXT from the command palette, and it dumps the whole codebase into a single .txt file under /flattened/. If the repo is too big for one LLM’s context window, it splits into chunks based on a configurable token limit (~4 chars per token, rough but fine). Each chunk starts with a directory tree, then the files in === FILE: path/to/file.ext === blocks. It also auto-adds /flattened to your .gitignore so you don’t accidentally commit the dumps.
The actually-useful part is the filtering. You don’t want node_modules in there. You probably don’t want test files or .env either. Everything gets configured through a single .flatten_ignore at the project root, which the extension generates for you on first run. Glob-based, with three sections — global for things you always want out, whitelist for narrowing down to specific paths, and blacklist for specific exceptions. There’s also a settings: section for per-project token caps.
A sample .flatten_ignore looks like this:
# Ignore rules
global:
node_modules
.git
dist
# Whitelist (optional)
whitelist:
src/**/*.js
# Blacklist (optional)
blacklist:
**/*.test.js
.env
# Settings (optional)
settings:
maxTokenLimit: 50000
maxTokensPerFile: 25000
You can also stick the same kind of config in .vscode/settings.json if you’d rather keep it with the rest of your VS Code stuff:
"flattenRepo.includeExtensions": [".ts", ".tsx", ".js", ".jsx", ".py", ".html", ".css"],
"flattenRepo.ignoreDirs": ["node_modules", ".git", "dist"],
"flattenRepo.maxChunkSize": 200000
That’s basically it. It’s command-only — no UI for picking files interactively, which I’d like to add at some point — and it doesn’t try to flatten binaries or images. Honestly, what I use it for most is dropping a flattened repo into a free model when I’ve already spent my paid credits for the month on something dumb.
GitHub Repo — feel free to open issues or send a PR if you want to take a swing at the file-picker UI.
Written with AI.