UX Backlog

[miguelsolorio]

Intro

This backlog is a collection of items related to the user experience of the product. Design will use this list as a discussion point for iteration planning as well as discussions with the team during our weekly ux sync. Additionally, we will use our design principles and design checklist to guide the process for designing and implementing this work.

The backlog is split up into three parts: Existing users, New users, and Not yet incorporated.

Backlog

Existing users

• Review code at your finger tips: hover, completion items, completion item details Explore improving UX for IntelliSense #63144
  • css completions showing MDN info
  • fonts, colors, etc. in completion items and completion details, hovers
• Update Octicons Update Octicons #65508
• Iconography re-design Inconsistent weight and use of color in iconography throughout UI #8017, Icons in notifications are used differently to the panel #44594
• Explore settings sync UX Explore settings sync UX #78869
• 🏃‍♂️ Explore Extensions Management UX Explore Extensions Management UX #68527
  • Improve the Show Running Extensions experience
  • Explore the best way to show additional meta information (running, start time)
  • Show this information on the extension detail view Running extensions view needs UX love #64344
• Improve Find All References make finding all references more user-friendly #22261
  • Implications for the monaco editor
  • Can this be done in the search viewlet instead?
  • Better empty selection state
• Overflow and customization for status bar Implement an overflow design for status bar entries #6651, Customizable status bar item locations #35744, Need option(s) to remove (less useful) status bar indicators #3874
• Make hover/suggest presentation consistent Hover / Suggest widget inconsistencies #78718
• Revisit extension recommendation end-to-end experience (on file load, ext. viewlet, etc.)
• 🏃 Improve Search when position is moved to panel Search view layout in panel can be improved #64418
  • The search icon is gone, making it harder to remember to use the keyboard shortcut
  • The over layout panel is not a good user of space
• Ability to move views into separate viewlets/panels (universal layout)
  • Ability to minimize panels
• Ability to pin tabs Add option to pin tabs similar to Visual Studio #12622
• Improve creating a new file/folder when explorer has content and when hidden
  • We should show a quickpick that has the path pre-populated
• Add touch support Visual Studio Code for ipad #70764
• Better experience for dynamic views/viewlets
  • Find all references
  • Hiding an activity bar item & accessing it
• Explore Hiding titlebar on Mac Mac: Provide a setting to hide the title bar and inline the window controls #12377
• Explore Fluent Design Fluent Design #26572, Titlebar-less view for Windows #17060, Make VSCode window transparent #12578, Windows, macOS and Linux transparency #52707
• Extension welcome pages and release notes
  • Potentially show an area on the welcome page for release notes and recently updates
    • Add "Recently updated" as a keyword option in the extension viewlet
    • Show diagnostics tab when in this view
    • Default tab would go to changelog from this view
• Explore ways for the community to contribute to designs in the same way as code is contributed https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-figma-toolkit
• Identify design inconsistencies with UI + JSON expriences Identify design inconsistencies with UI + JSON expriences #84309
• Add guidelines for extension authors Create design guidelines for extension authors #104006

---

New users

• First user onboarding experience
  • 🏃 Welcome page Explore improving UX for Welcome Page #63152
  • 🏃 Stacking of notifications (particularly when on non-English locales)
  • Playground
  • UI overview
  • Loading of webpage on first launch
  • Guidance to install extensions
• 🏃 Website re-design
  • roadmap outlining incremental steps to a friendlier, more modern website
  • Internationalization
  • Reducing visual noise
  • Use web-worker
• Improve discoverability for regular expression (boolean operators) in search and find widget (Ref: Add Boolean operators to "Find" #66206)
• Discoverability: How do we raise awareness of functionality?
  • Using web worker to show functionality on website
  • Use tool as to learn t
• Update default theme colors with modern color palette (Fluent?)
• Define a color system for color tokens

[eliashdezr]

@misolori
It is possible to consider this feature for this backlog?
#12622

Has to be some of the most wanted UI features, yet not a single word from the team.

[miguelsolorio]

@eliashdezr 👍 added

[gkkirilov]

These issues should get some priority. #52707 was ready but wasn't merged.
Visuals are as important as new features

[gkkirilov]

Can we also add 32257?
Thanks for the awesome editor 💖

[SupinePandora43]

what's about allowing custom background image?! something like

[zbandhan]

Could you please let us know if the topmost feature in the list will take longer time to be merged?

[miguelsolorio]

@zbandhan which item are you referring to?

[zbandhan]

Thank you for your quick reply and sorry for my late.
@misolori I'm referring to #63144

[SamAtAnyRoad]

I see that boolean search references here, and that ticket is closed and mentioned as having been added to this list, but it seems that it never actually was added to the list.

Boolean search is an essential feature, and regex search isn't really a replacement for it. Certain operations, like looking for all files that contain "email" AND "receipt" are trivially easy in a standard boolean search and devilishly difficult to phrase effectively in regex.

[lambainsaan]

Hey @misolori , dumb question but what do you mean by items that have 🏃‍♂️? Does it mean part of the current sprint?

[miguelsolorio]

@lambainsaan they're not all necessarily tied to a milestone, it just means we are actively working on it or have efforts in place to be working on them. You can think of it as being "active".

[tclzcja]

Hi @misolori quick question about “Add touch support #70764”.

In order for VS Code to be on iPadOS, is the main blocker more about the Apple App Store/Electron/HTML5 policy? Or it’s something smaller like touch support?

For a long time I thought it’s the Apple’s policy that makes it difficult for VS Code to land, but since you use “Add touch support” as the title there, I’m just a little confused.

Thank you very much!

[lujo777]

@misolori, It would be cool, if they will publish VS Code for iPadOS, but, i think, touch support is only support for touch-screens in browser version of vsc (online.visualstudio.com) :(

[miguelsolorio]

@tclzcja @lujo777 the touch support issue is to support Visual Studio Online, we don't have any current plans to create an iOS app.

[tclzcja]

@misolori got it, thank you.

[thomasio101]

@misolori, I understand there are no official plans to create an iOS app, but I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to attempt creating a simplified version of Visual Studio which only includes core functionality for development.

By the way @tclzcja, Apple's policy would make it quite difficult to implement a full Visual Studio Code experience on either iOS or iPadOS as the policy forbids apps that are able to run arbitrary code (Which is strange, given the existence and success of apps like Codea.). But the policy does not, or so I think, forbid apps that remotely execute code, so just having a built-in SSH terminal would be allowed for example.

[miguelsolorio]

Closing this issue as most items are complete and we've created a new, revamped, version in #146840