For working with the tab bar off, where a side list is the tab bar. VS Code's
Open Editors view already does pinning; what it does not do is colour by
project, and it is a tree rather than a flat list.
- A Tabs view in the Explorer: one row per open editor, no group nodes. A
TreeDataProvider whose items have no children renders as a list, since
there is no separate list API.
- Each row's icon is tinted by the project containing the file — the nearest
.csproj/.fsproj/.vbproj, package.json, Cargo.toml, go.mod, pyproject.toml,
pom.xml or build.gradle above it, configurable. The colour comes from a
hash of the project name, so a project keeps its colour across sessions
rather than depending on the order tabs happened to open in. Eight
contributed theme colours, all overridable.
- Sort by open order, project (so the colours run in blocks), or file name,
with pinned tabs lifted to the top.
- Close, close others (keeping pinned), pin/unpin, copy path, reveal.
- The list follows the active editor.
Two API limits shape this, both covered by tests:
- Nothing can activate an arbitrary tab. A file-backed tab is focused by
re-opening its resource in its own group, which handles text, diffs,
notebooks and custom editors. Webview tabs have no resource, so they are
listed and marked as unfocusable instead of pretending.
- Only the *active* editor can be pinned, so pinning another row focuses it
first.
Commands act on live vscode.Tab objects rather than the row snapshots handed
to them. The first cut compared against a snapshot's isPinned and so silently
did nothing on unpin, and read the provider's cached list, which is empty
until the tree has been rendered.
Also worth recording, both found by the tests: VS Code moves a pinned tab to
the front of its group, so `open` order shows pinned first regardless of the
pinnedFirst setting; and closeAllEditors leaves pinned editors open, so test
cleanup closes through the tab API instead.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
maxandClaude Opus 5
7e104450e8