# Browse messages in Kafka topics with Message Viewer Confluent for VS Code includes the **Message Viewer**. Use it to browse, search, and filter the messages in an Apache Kafka® topic directly from your editor, without switching to a separate tool. Click the **play** icon next to a topic name to open the **Message Viewer**. It lets you search and explore messages in that topic. In Message Viewer, you can: - Page through and search for specific values within the list of all messages. - Double-click a message to see its headers, key, and value decoded to JSON. The detail view also shows metadata about the key or value schema used for deserialization. - Pause and resume consuming at any time. - See aggregate counts of messages over time in the histogram view, and drag across the histogram to filter messages by timestamp. - Toggle partitions on and off to show and hide messages from specific partitions. ## Related content - [Confluent for VS Code with Confluent Platform](overview.md#cp-vscode-extension) - [Explore, create, and evolve schemas in Schema Registry](vscode-schemas.md#cp-vscode-schemas) - [Connect to a Kafka Cluster with Confluent for VS Code](vscode-connect-to-kafka.md#cp-vscode-connect-to-kafka)