The posts in the series will be divided so each post will deal with a different aspect, api method or flow so it can be read without context and will not require to read the full series (although it could help 😀) The posts written in at the same time as the extension so the progress will be in accordance so the topics. So, the third motivation is to show how to implement different functionalities in an extension. In order to present a view, you need to do a bunch of things that in different places in the code base so you not always know where to look. If it was a simple flatted library (such lodash), code snippets will do the job. I must to say, it’s not trivial, for me at least. They’re basically saying: “here is the code, try to understand how we did it”. To cover on that, there is a great demos repository but with that, you need to do “reverse engineering”. Vscode API’s docs are basically good but I feel that many times it lacks a context. I already tried to develop a tiny extension before but now I want to use more advanced API capabilities to enrich that plugin and make it ready for real use.

Second, I’m using vscode intensively and I like to know it better. Click on a file, will open a diff view, side by side and (hopefully) the user will be able to take or leave changes just like in git merge. Once the other folder selected, the extension will compare the content of the folders and display a tree view of the files with the difference. In that panel, the user could choose a folder anywhere in the file system.

There will be a dedicated panel for this in the view panel (in the left side of the app, at the same place the the files explorer). As much as it’s a trivial need and there are a lot of tools out there, vscode has none. With that plugin you can compare 2 folders’ content just like you do with git by comparing a branch code to master. The post is (will be) part of a series (🤞) and the only one who will not include any code examples and technical stuff. This post meant to introduce the journey of the Visual Studio Code (“vscode”) plugin CompareFolders.

Compare folders