When VS Code's "Open Recent" fails you

#productivity #webdev #vscode #showdev

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 💪, that, amongst many productivity boosters, lets you customize your VS Code homescreen.

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

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

🕵️ 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 🤔 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.

🙈 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 🛸 to find your important projects quickly Marquee will sort your projects by relevance.

The relevance of your individual VS Code project is ranked by the number of 💡 todos & notes associated per project (another neat feature Marquee provides). You will find that the projects 📈 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.