While we're going for string escaping, I thought it might be nice to switch to something more type-safe and use functions + string templates, would help keep track of variables used better.

I could convert other templates at a later time also, but this could be a nice starting point, unless there's benefits to replacing that I might be overseeing.

In case we end up with content that needs to not be escaped somehow, we could expand this function to support more complex cases but for now I just wanted to create a wrapper.

Would it make sense to use handlebars or a similar templating engine rather than roll something ourselves?

that might be nice though not sure how complex our templates can get; in any case I'd maybe personally prefer an engine written with TypeScript in mind like eta

With stuff like replacing characters we'd probably end up handling it ourselves or use a plugin with these template engines. Honestly to me having a function build a string seems like a nicer experience mainly because of arguments being exposed in the IDE though perhaps a template engine would be more scalable for the future.

cc: @alenakhineika

With Gaurab we have discussed a revamp of how we do templates with things like adding shortcut information to them, it might be a better moment to discuss introducing i.e. a templating engine, I created VSCODE-661 to keep track of that.

I could go ahead with this setup for now just to have it in for release and we can change it to whatever we decide more globally later.