⚠️ This is a vibe-coded plugin. It was built quickly and iteratively with an AI coding assistant, for personal use. It works, but it has not been rigorously tested or audited — use at your own risk.

Workspace Explorer

An alternate, PKMS-friendly file explorer sidebar for VS Code / Cursor, with folder coloring, per-folder sorting, pinning, and a MindChuk-style collection preview board for your notes.

Built for note-taking / personal-knowledge-management workflows (Markdown vaults), but works in any workspace.

Features

Explorer sidebar

• Folder coloring — assign a swatch color (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, gray) to a folder's icon, and an inherited text color that cascades to its contents.
• Per-folder sorting — each folder remembers its own sort (name ↑/↓ or last-edited ↑/↓).
• Pinning — pin files to the top of their folder or to the top of the whole tree.
• Hidden files — hide noise and toggle visibility on demand.
• Open/closed folder icons, persisted expansion state, and drag-and-drop moving.
• Tags, orphans, and recent files views for navigating a Markdown vault.
• Tag sorting — sort the Tags view by name (A→Z / Z→A) or by count (high→low / low→high).

Collection Preview (MindChuk-style board)

Click a folder or a tag to open a scrollable card board of its notes in the editor area. Toggle it in settings via workspaceExplorer.collectionPreview.enabled.

• True masonry layout — cards pack top-to-bottom in responsive columns with no row gaps.
• Matches your sort — cards follow the source folder's sort mode (or the current tag sort).
• Live search — filter the board as you type by note title and content. Available for both folders and tags.
• Quick add note (folders only) — an "Add note" button opens an inline title + text form to create a new .md in that folder. No title falls back to a date/time name.
• Expand / Compress toggle — view cards at their natural height, or truncate them all to a uniform size. Compressed cards stay individually scrollable.
• Rendered Markdown previews — notes render as (smaller-scale) preview Markdown, with interactive task checkboxes that write back to the source file.
• Images — shown as a centered slice at a fixed height when expanded, shrunk to fit when compressed.
• PDFs and other files — shown as a compact file thumbnail.
• Cards are colored by their nearest colored ancestor folder.
• Card titles show the filename (with extension), middle-truncated when long.
• Pinned notes float to the top of the board with a pin badge, mirroring the explorer's pinning.
• Auto-refresh — the board updates on filesystem changes (create/rename/move/delete), sort changes, and pin changes.
• Right-click a card for the same actions as right-clicking the file in the explorer — open to side, pin/unpin, hide/unhide, rename, move, duplicate, delete, reveal in OS, open in terminal, and copy (relative) path.

Install

This is distributed as a packaged .vsix rather than via the Marketplace.

# Build from source
npm install
npm run compile
npx @vscode/vsce package --allow-missing-repository

# Install the resulting .vsix
code   --install-extension workspace-explorer-1.1.0.vsix --force   # VS Code
cursor --install-extension workspace-explorer-1.1.0.vsix --force   # Cursor

Then reload the window. Open the Workspace Explorer view in the sidebar.

Development

• Source is a single file: src/extension.ts.
• npm run compile — type-check and build to out/.
• npm run watch — incremental rebuilds.
• npx @vscode/vsce package --allow-missing-repository — produce a .vsix.

License

MIT © 2026 jpmoore