Iteration Plan for June 2018

[kieferrm]

This plan captures our work in June. This is a 4-week iteration. We will ship our June Update in early July.

In May, we previewed several feature: the grid layout for editors, the alternative UI for settings, the file outline in the explorer, and the docked debug toolbar. In June, we continue to focus on those items and try to move them out of their preview state. How far we get there clearly depends on the feedback we hear from you.

This iteration, we also start to officially work on an extension to support pull requests. Dealing with pull requests is a big part of our daily life. Unsurprisingly, we have been exploring ideas in the area for a while but it was too fuzzy where it should go. We now have a more crisp understanding of the approach we want to take. All of our work happens on GitHub and so, with GitHub's help, we'll focus on GitHub support first. The emering APIs will allow for broad vendor support.

Endgame

• June 25th, 2018: Code freeze for the endgame
• June 29st, 2018: Endgame done

The endgame details for this iteration are tracked in #52781.

Plan Items

Below is a summary of the top level plan items.

Legend of annotations:

Mark	Description
🏃	work in progress
✋	blocked task
💪	stretch goal for this iteration
🔴	missing issue reference
🔵	more investigation required to remove uncertainty
⚫	under discussion within the team

Workbench

• Finish grid layout for editors Support a grid layout for editors #14909 @bpasero @joaomoreno @isidorn
  • Support centered layout Grid: Implement "Centered Editor Layout" #50936 @bpasero @joaomoreno @isidorn
  • API impact of the new Grid layout support on extensions Investigate the impact of grid editor on extensions and API #51001 @bpasero
• 🏃 Continue to improve settings experience Provide GUI for settings #3355 @roblourens
  • 🏃 Explore TOC inside the settings editor Explore 'table of contents' in settings editor #51773 @roblourens @misolori
  • 💪 🏃 Explore settings editor improvements possible with additional metadata Explore extending settings schema with additional metadata #51778 @roblourens @misolori
• Quick box improvements for multi-step inputs Quick box improvements for multi-step inputs #49340 @chrmarti
• Provide custom title bar and menus for improved accessibility on Windows Windows: Investigate custom menu implementation #29024 @sbatten @bpasero
• Finish supporting an Outline view (error ticks, select vs. filter option) Feature request: symbols tree view #5605 @jrieken
• Explore bread crumb support for navigation Feature Request : Navigation Bar like Visual Studio or Eclipse #9418 @jrieken
• Support readonly workspace folders Readonly workspace folders #51585 @isidorn
• Improve rendering of resources contributed by a file system provider FileSystemProvider and uri labels #51446 @isidorn
• Support unified way to navigate in the history of input fields (find, change, search, ...) Change the default shortcut of Search history navigation to up and down arrows #12645 Show Replace history for Editor find widget #50583 @sandy081

Install

• Support portable mode install Portable version! #329 @joaomoreno
• Support user level install on Windows Allow user-level installations #534 @joaomoreno

Terminal

• Investigate: Architectural improvements to the underlying library Custom addons xtermjs/xterm.js#1128 Improved Layering and enabling TS strict xtermjs/xterm.js#1507 @Tyriar
• Enable more reliable terminal multi-plexing Terminal Providers #46192 @Tyriar

Editor

• Investigate: Hover can get in the way @alexandrudima Tooltips gets in the way of general operations in the editor #15667

Languages

Language Server Protocol

• 🏃 Investigate improved visualization of language client and language server interactions Dogfood for Vetur development octref/lsp-inspector#2 Polish UI for the inspector octref/lsp-inspector#3 Spec JSON format for loading octref/lsp-inspector#7 Extend Node SDK to allow JSON format output octref/lsp-inspector#8 Host the inspector on the website octref/lsp-inspector#9 @octref @dbaeumer
• 🏃 💪 Explore improved support for language extension tests Expand the sample to cover all language features octref/vscode-language-server-e2e-test#3
  Add a testing section to Language Server Guide octref/vscode-language-server-e2e-test#2 @octref @dbaeumer

JavaScript/TypeScript

• Update paths on folder rename Updates JS/TS imports on directory rename #50244 @mjbvz
• Pick up TS 2.9.2 Adopt TS 2.9.2 #51807 @mjbvz

CSS/HTML/JSON

• Improve support for CSS pseudo classes [css] add ':focus-within' pseudo class #41248 @octref
• Improve accuracy for browser compatibility data of CSS items Adopt browser-compat-data to show compatibility in hover / completion vscode-css-languageservice#102 @octref
• Gracefully handle unknown at-rules Gracefully Handle Unknown At-Rules vscode-css-languageservice#51 @octref

Debug

• Refine the docked positioning of the debug toolbar Refine debug toolbar #52490 @isidorn @weinand
• WSL debug support: switch from bash.exe to wsl.exe use WSL.exe instead of bash.exe #51455 @weinand
• 🏃 Investigate more fine-grained support for smart-step Microsoft/vscode-chrome-debug-core#245 @roblourens

Extension Contributions

• Support several forthcoming PRs against the xterm.js project Add optional character joiner xtermjs/xterm.js#1460 Revamp wcwidth xtermjs/xterm.js#1470 grapheme support xtermjs/xterm.js#1478 @Tyriar
• 🏃 Provide support for pull requests Short term roadmap vscode-pull-request-github#1 @RMacfarlane @rebornix @shana @daviwil @sguthals
• 🏃 Improve end-2-end test coverage of the Vetur LS Cover Vetur's Language Features with ene-to-end tests vuejs/vetur#802 @octref

Extensions

• Add current extension to workspace recommendations Better UX for recommended extensions #13456 @ramya-rao-a
• Add ability to freely customize the default Extensions view Show Disabled Extensions at the Bottom of Extensions List #27061 @ramya-rao-a
• Allow to dismiss extension recommendations Allow hiding some recommended extensions #48743 @JacksonKearl @ramya-rao-a

API

• Allow for read-only File System Providers Readonly workspace folders #51585 @isidorn
• Support that a completion result can indicate the suggested completion item Feature Request: API support for autocomplete "preselection" #35551 @jrieken
• Finalize API for
  • WebView persistence Finalize Webview persistence API #49022 @mjbvz
  • Greying out unused variables Add official API for fading out unused code #51104 @mjbvz
• Propose API for
  • Compute definition locations Extend language API to allow sourceRange in Go to Definition #10037 @mjbvz
  • Subscribing to file rename events Allow extensions to participate in file rename/move operations #43768 @mjbvz @jrieken
  • 🏃 SearchProvider, support to invoke find in files programmatically Search Provider extension API #47058 @roblourens
  • Hierachical Document Symbols API for hierarchical document symbol data #34968 @jrieken
  • Quick box multi-step inputs Quick box improvements for multi-step inputs #49340 @chrmarti
  • Adapt WebView API in support for editor grid layout @mjbvz Make sure webview API is ready for grid layout #52078
• Custom view API enhancements
  • Support that a custom view can query whether it is visible Ability to know if a custom view is visible or not #48198 @sandy081
  • Support to listen to selection changes Missing onDidChangeSelection-like event #50662 @sandy081

Engineering

• Improve smoke test reliability @joaomoreno
• Investigate in tree widget performance Tree slow! #18180 @joaomoreno
• Retrain issue classifier bot Retrain issue classifier bot #49341 @chrmarti
• 🏃 💪 Convert samples to use tasks 2.0 Convert samples to Tasks 2.0.0 #50876 @dbaeumer team
• Improve TextFileService to support workspace resource edits WorkspaceEdit: edit followed by deleteResource does not work #42640 @bpasero

Documentation

• 🏃 Continue to update our getting started videos Docs: Update intro video section and revamp videos #51912 @auchenberg

---

Deferred Items

• Provide completion proposals in the search box of the Extensions view Improve discoverability of search filters in the extensions sidebar #46333 @ramya-rao-a
• 🏃 Adopt Electron 2.0 Electron v2.0.0 #48290 @bpasero @Tyriar
• Explore: Investigate support for Extension Packs independent of the extensionDependencies property @sandy081
• Allow for case-sensitive/insensitive File System Providers Case-sensitivity and file system providers #48258 @isidorn
• In settings search provide a way to show matching but not-installed extensions Show settings search matches from non-installed extensions #49474 @roblourens
• 🏃 Support for custom editor tab icons for webviews Allow webview panels to provide a custom icon #48864 @mjbvz

[rozzzly]

Disenfranchise Community

• 🏃Continue to ignore user's № 1 requested feature (multi/floating window support) a la Allow for floating windows #10121
  (10+ additional (unaddressed) issues available upon request—I'm serious, I can link at least 10)

Distateful? I agree. Not the place? I agree. Necessary? Apparently so—because the community has been being ignored; those other issues haven't received a substanative/definitive response from a core contributor in quite some time despite steady (if not increasing) demand by the community.
How about someone from the vscode team address the issue instead of avoiding it.
If the team has decided they are against multi window support, that's their prerogative, but make a statement.

[egamma]

@rozzzly we are not ignoring this feature, but this feature is challenging due to architectural constraints that are explained here: #10121 (comment).

Also in 1.24 we have added a command that duplicates a workspace in a new window, please see https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_24#_duplicate-workspace-in-new-window.

[rozzzly]

@egamma thank you for responding. Perhaps "ignoring" is too hash a word; I follow the GitHub activity pretty avidly but could never possibly see all the discussion which happens online, let alone that which takes place in the real-world. So if GitHub activity, is my/the community's only metric for measuring the team's desire/interest/commitment for this feature—of which there has been little to none in quite some time—then surely you can understand my/our distress.

Moreover, because this feature would require such a radical change, and have such far reaching implications, it is worrysome that month after month I read these iteration plans and see no mention of it (either directly, or indirectly via gradual architectural changes). In essence, from the perspective of a community member, the lack of open discussion, or even incremental action is effectivly equivalent to "ignoring this feature."

I heard about the complexities of the issue beback in November of 2017 when I read the issue you linked to... But not much more about it from core contributors since then. If it's not being ignored, well... what's being done about it? What's the approach? From the lack of open discussion on the topic; from my perspective, nothing is...

Allowing duplicate workspaces sounds like a reasonable approach to the issue.

[egamma]

@rozzzly let me step back, as described in our development process we use a 6 month roadmap to share what we are planning to work and focus on. We continuously do re-planning as part of the iteration plan. Items that are not on the Roadmap obviously get less attention from our team. Floating windows did not make it into the last Roadmap update in favor of supporting a grid layout for editors. Grid layout was one of the most wanted features at that time and this feature is now available in insiders builds. We update the Roadmap every 6 months and a next update will take place soon. During an update we for sure consider issues with many 👍 votes. We could still decide to not do such a feature due to implementation costs/constraints, this is reality.

Bottom line, the best way to contribute to this process is to 👍 vote for your favorite features. Comments/complaints that we ignore users do not really help much.

[rozzzly]

Far enough. Sorry I had to pester you to get a clear response.

[ayush987goyal]

I hope #534 doesn't get deferred this time. User level installation is one of the key features most of in corp are waiting for.

[benfrain]

Look, I know this isn't necessarily the right place but any chance you could add this to the CSS/HTML/JSON stack; make CSS selectors first class 'symbols' so they can be found in workspaces: #15053

[j-oliveras]

@kieferrm I think you want to make a link on the number at Support centered layout 50936 item.