Explore Extensions Management UX

Extensions Management include:

• Managing installed extensions

  • Enabled
  • Disabled
  • All installed
  • Built in
  • Outdated

• Browsing Marketplace

  • Searching
  • Categories
  • Order of viewing

• Show Recommendations

  • Workspace
  • General (file)

Over the time this viewlet has become a single place for all of the above which made it

• Flooded with views and making them hard to manage
• Hard to distinguish among installed, recommendations and market place
• Missing prominent information on installed extensions
  • Active
  • Running
  • Activation time
• Viewlet is lacking space to provide necessary information like
  • Why reload is required
  • Due to this fact, we have a different page for running extensions
• There is no nice landing page
• Hard to browse extensions in market place with categories

This seems like Extensions viewlet is overloaded with too many features and used for managing/browsing/customising extensions instead of just using like an explorer.

Goal of this issue is to explore some ideas considering all above use cases and come with a good design which gets aligned with current VS Code UX.

Following are some issues that are kinda related to current viewlet

• Hide extension rating and downloads for installed extensions #68456
• Allow multiple filters in extensions search input #68529
• The second installed extension doesn't auto display in 'Installed Extension' view till reloading VS Code #68584
• Trusted Publisher Verification & Verified Publisher Filtering for Extensions #68590
• "Recently Updated" Pre-defined Extensions search filter #68711
• Recommend extension from extension tab #68702
• After disabling a VSIX extension, the extension shows dimmed in the "ENABLED" list #67369
• Separate sections for installed Features and Themes in default view of Extensions sidebar #84390