Allow extensions to contribute a view to the navigation pane.

[indiejames]

It would be very useful for extensions to be able to contribute views to the navigation pane / leftmost pane. For instance, a Clojure extension might contribute a tree view of namespaces with symbols as the leaves for project navigation. This would allow a user to jump to a position in a file were a symbol within a namespace was defined.

[kieferrm]

@indiejames seems my original comment didn't make it through. Just pushing back on your use case a bit, why is what we have in the command palette not enough?

(I can see other good use case for a custom navigation pane, but I wonder about your concrete example.)

[indiejames]

I think the command palette symbol navigation is great once you are familiar with the symbols in a project and you know which one you want, but a browsable tree structure is very helpful when you are exploring a new codebase. Instead of browsing files you browse namespaces and symbols.

I'll try to put an example image together later tonight when I have more time. For now it might be helpful to think of something like the navigation pane in Javadocs, where you can navigate packages to view the classes and methods on classes.

[indiejames]

This is sort of what I'm thinking for Clojure namespaces:

In this case the user has set a filter to narrow the scope of the displayed namespaces to anything starting with 'repl-test', expanded the 'repl-test.util' namespace, and selected the 'bar' symbol (which would open the file for that namespace in an editor pane and move the cursor to the start of the function definition). The icons of the left of the symbol names indicate type; in this case function or macro.

[ivanz]

Was just about to open an issue for the same thing, when I found this one! Similar situation here: the "command palette" is good for when know in advance what you are looking for , but not particularly amazing for code exploration. I have been using VSCode over the last 2 weeks on a couple of C# projects and would have been great to have some sort of a symbol browser on the side.

[patrickjuchli]

This would be a great feature for extensions. I'm working on a JS code exploration tool that would fit perfectly into this side bar. I could also imagine to use the VSCode UI Elements for that. Maybe the side bar could be a good test bed for custom UI extension features in the future?

[FabianLauer]

@aeschli j4i, looks like this is being tracked here: #15262
Also: #15217 (comment)

[pavolmarko]

I would also be interested in this - my usecase is writing an extension which displays a view very similar to the Git view, but instead of displaying unstaged/staged changes, would display changes done since the current branch has branched off the master branch, as this would help me in my workflow.

[bpasero]

/cc @sandy081

[sandy081]

This is implemented by #26948. Please use this feature and open new issues for new requests. Closing this.