Welcome page customization and the behavior of Ctrl/Cmd+R

[scaomath]

A longer recent list

Related: #106715, #83451

While I understand the vscode team is not pursuing in this direction (#30646, #63057), it would be really nice if the number of recent shown can be customized.

Especially for people using a screen with higher resolutions:

Better Ctrl/Cmd + R behavior

I understand that this function is similar to Ctrl+R, then type the filename. However, upon opening a specific file, the workspace that file is under will NOT be automatically loaded:

For the example above, upon hitting enter, the workspace ft-experiment will not be loaded. Therefore I myself like to load the workspace first, then Ctrl+P, which makes the first simple change more attractive.

Reason behind

Working in scientific computing often deals with LaTeX, experimental code, production code, debugging happening in the same repo same branch. I myself often uses multiple workspaces to handle different "working spaces" (I also taught my student to do so...), which makes displaying more workspaces or folder in the welcome page a nice feature. Thoughts?

[bolu-tife]

Hello @JacksonKearl I would like to work on this issue. Do you have any guide on how to reproduce this and what is required to be done?

[JacksonKearl]

@bolu-tife Sure!

To reproduce, set the max results setting to some larger value, and run a search in the search editor which has more results than the value:

Access search editor with:

You can start by changing the limit passed here to read from the configurationService

vscode/src/vs/workbench/contrib/searchEditor/browser/searchEditor.ts

Line 490 in d7712ed

maxResults: 10000,

Then, you should add a way for the search to be re run with no limit. See what happens in the search from the sidebar, whose code is here: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/1fc68f3cf274141942b424894645a4f7096ec1f1/src/vs/workbench/contrib/search/browser/searchView.ts#L0-L1 for how to make that change.

[bolu-tife]

Thank you

[dustinm76]

@JacksonKearl I'm a bit confused about your suggested fix. It seems like the issue here was more about making the Recent list longer than getting a large number of results to show up in the search editor.

[JacksonKearl]

@dustinm76 sorry about that, I was thinking of #129153 for some reason. This requires a bit of design discussion so not really something that can be implemented at the moment.

@scaomath One alternative in this vein is the concept of "favoriting" workspaces, so instead of having a longer list of 10+ recent workspaces, you might have your 4 "Starred" workspaces at the top of the list, then 6 recent ones after that. Would that work for your use case?

[scaomath]

@scaomath One alternative in this vein is the concept of "favoriting" workspaces, so instead of having a longer list of 10+ recent workspaces, you might have your 4 "Starred" workspaces at the top of the list, then 6 recent ones after that. Would that work for your use case?

Personally I like this change a lot (especially for those us who have workspaces involving loading docker containers), but I doubt adding extra UI elements is what VSCode community want...

Guess I will wait for someone to implement an extension for this.

[githrdw]

@scaomath I ran into the same thing and therefore decided to make an extension in the form of a dashboard. Maybe you want to try it out? It is a dashboard where widgets can be placed on such as a fixed list of folders or workspaces, a WYSIWYG editor and a list of recently opened folders (limit count is dynamic). But the best part is that you can make your own widgets with React.

You can install from the marketplace:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=rubendew.vsch-core

Or feel free to take a peek in the source code:
https://github.com/githrdw/vsc-home