Explore Extensions Management UX

[sandy081]

Explore Extensions Management UX

Extensions Management include:

• Managing installed extensions

  • Enabled
  • Disabled
  • All installed
  • Built in
  • Outdated

• Browsing Marketplace

  • Searching
  • Categories
  • Order of viewing

• Show Recommendations

  • Workspace
  • General (file)

Over the time this viewlet has become a single place for all of the above which made it

• Flooded with views and making them hard to manage
• Hard to distinguish among installed, recommendations and market place
• Missing prominent information on installed extensions
  • Active
  • Running
  • Activation time
• Viewlet is lacking space to provide necessary information like
  • Why reload is required
  • Due to this fact, we have a different page for running extensions
• There is no nice landing page
• Hard to browse extensions in market place with categories

This seems like Extensions viewlet is overloaded with too many features and used for managing/browsing/customising extensions instead of just using like an explorer.

Goal of this issue is to explore some ideas considering all above use cases and come with a good design which gets aligned with current VS Code UX.

Following are some issues that are kinda related to current viewlet

• Hide extension rating and downloads for installed extensions #68456
• Allow multiple filters in extensions search input #68529
• The second installed extension doesn't auto display in 'Installed Extension' view till reloading VS Code #68584
• Trusted Publisher Verification & Verified Publisher Filtering for Extensions #68590
• "Recently Updated" Pre-defined Extensions search filter #68711
• Recommend extension from extension tab #68702
• After disabling a VSIX extension, the extension shows dimmed in the "ENABLED" list #67369
• Separate sections for installed Features and Themes in default view of Extensions sidebar #84390

[tmsns]

Might be an idea to use the the actual marketplace site in a webview for all “Browsing Marketplace” related items?

[alexweininger]

I think it would be worth while to consider implementing a way to group or organize extensions, enabling the user to quickly enable/disable project specific extensions when setting up a workspace.

[RoestVrijStaal]

This might be a separate issue but...

I'd advice to add to Managing installed extensions the criteria Unmaintained. Which means the shown extension(s) didn't get any update from its developer within a year or after a new major (or minor) release of VScode.

For each extension you need to manually navigate to its source repository to check its maintenance status. Which is obviously annoying.

[LonMcGregor]

It would be nice to be able to install an extension, and automatically enable it just for the current workspace.

Right now to do this you need to Install it, disable it, then re-enable it for the current workspace (potentially needing to reload the UI after each step).

[gulshan]

LonMcGregor Just disable the extension and re-enable it for the current workspace. No reload required. After initial disabling, a reload button will show up (not knowing your future intension), which will be gone after re-enabling for the current workspace.

[IgorKrupenja]

I think it would also be nice to have a way to recently updated extensions so you could check out release notes for those.

[usernamehw]

I remember asking about sorting of Running Extensions by activation/activation time to be able to find slow-loading extensions quickly. Can't find it now, but the response was that the fate of the Running Extensions is unclear: should it be in Extensions viewlet or in a separate tab.

I could probably send a PR, but only after this decision is made. Is it resolved now?