Hierarchy for roots in multi-root workspace

[ddurschlag]

In some projects, having many workspace roots is very helpful. Right now, these are organized by the name property in the folders map in the workspace file. It would be great if there were some way to create hierarchy here -- with the folders map being able to contain sub-maps (seems complicated: changes to IWorkspace, IWorkspaceFolder, etc.), using slashes in the name property to indicate containment (kinda janky but looks easier to implement, maybe), or by some other method.

One example use case: a suite of disparate plugins all in one workspace. With this feature, the workspace could have two visible roots, "core/" and "plugins/" with all the plugin folders together. Currently, all the plugin would have to be added directly, making it hard to pick out the (much more important) "core/" from the list.

[vscode-triage-bot]

This feature request is now a candidate for our backlog. The community has 60 days to upvote the issue. If it receives 20 upvotes we will move it to our backlog. If not, we will close it. To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding!

[ddurschlag]

It looks like

vscode/src/vs/workbench/contrib/files/common/explorerModel.ts

Line 32 in f280f4c

const setRoots = () => this._roots = this.contextService.getWorkspace().folders

could be modified to implement this via the "slashes are magic" approach. It would involve breaking up incoming roots by / and creating a hierarchy of ExplorerItems instead of mapping 1:1, making sure the assigned leaf URIs are correct, and merging these trees produced by each workspace folder at the very least. Making the workspace folder format hierarchical would also involve changes here, but would additionally require changes to the definition of WorkspaceFolder, and thus, I suspect, more widespread interface breakage.

I'm not sure what assumptions downstream code makes that this might violate (this would involve having "virtual" ExplorerItems that are neither a root nor a on-disk directory, and I don't know if that happens now. They could neither be "remove from workspace"ed directly (though in theory that could remove all virtual subdirectories) nor "delete"ed, for example). Information on this would be welcome.

[vscode-triage-bot]

This feature request has not yet received the 20 community upvotes it takes to make to our backlog. 10 days to go. To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding!

[vscode-triage-bot]

🙁 In the last 60 days, this feature request has received less than 20 community upvotes and we closed it. Still a big Thank You to you for taking the time to create this issue! To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding!