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Sebastian Tiedtke
Sebastian Tiedtke

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When VS Code's "Open Recent" fails you

We love VS Code 🀟. We spent many hours heads-down in Microsoft's open source IDE to bring Marquee to you. Marquee is a powerful extension πŸ’ͺ, that, amongst many productivity boosters, lets you customize your VS Code homescreen.

VS Code turned 5 years old πŸŽ‰ this year. Just like with many open technologies, VS Code's available API docs are high quality but still sparse. Thankfully πŸ™ the VS Code team publishes an enormous mono-repo with samples that showcase how different APIs work.

Lots of VS Code windows

During the average development week you quickly πŸ“š rack up 10s of VS Code windows browsing different sources, making progress on a variety of projects, and helping πŸ’ others reviewing their pull requests. Thanks to its ⚑ lightning fast nature, VS Code handles your many IDE windows, often running in parallel, just fine.

πŸ•΅οΈ What's troublesome - losing track of the past

If you opened all 46 API examples in VS Code, one folder each, in between working on your day and pet projects 🀞 good luck keeping track of your history. Find that one folder or workspace you πŸ€” can't remember. This problem only get exacerbated as time goes by and you continue cycling through projects. This is why we have built Marquee's Projects widget.

πŸ™ˆ When "open recent" fails you

There are two kind of VS Code windows you need: Folders & Workspaces. Folders you'd use for quick, likely non-permanent, tasks you want to accomplish whereas workspaces you'd use for more 🧐 permanent long-ranging projects. You'd likely fine-tune your workspaces' settings & extensions to support your productivity. Marquee's Projects widget will keep a tally of all folders & workspaces you've opened ever. To make it even quicker πŸ›Έ to find your important projects quickly Marquee will sort your projects by relevance.

Projects Widget in action

The relevance of your individual VS Code project is ranked by the number of πŸ’‘ todos & notes associated per project (another neat feature Marquee provides). You will find that the projects πŸ“ˆ most important to you will naturally generate the most notes & todos. The widget also provides you with a handy text filter box to help finding that needle in the haystack.

πŸ“« What do you use to rank your projects importance?

Let us know in the comments! Please install Marquee and be sure to πŸ„ give it a spin.

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