Extension pollutes recently opened files

[gsaslis]

User input:

After a time all the files that I open during review are left in the recently opened files under some application path /var/folders/...
So I'm thinking would it be possible for a vscode extension to clean up after itself those files?

It's possible to clean up manually, just thinking it would be nice if the extension could do it by itself

[sebastinez]

Here a picture for reference

[gsaslis]

Relevant discussion on zulip: https://radicle.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/380896-ide-plugins/topic/extension.20pollutes.20recently.20opened.20files/near/398686609

Workaround exists!

Ok was able to assign a hotkey to remove all recently opened files which makes it easier.
And it seems vscode is working on being able to exclude paths from recently opened files
microsoft/vscode#157395

[maninak]

It seems that none of the workarounds are effective. We likely need to figure out how to do the "in-memory" diffing which requires tricky reverse engineering from other extensions, but it will be worth it in the end if we crack it.

[maninak]

Oh wow, this came up and looks promising!!

microsoft/vscode#157395 (comment)

[maninak]

:sadface:

I implemented a new config radicle.hideTempFiles in the extension's settings with default true, which updates the user's vscode config search.exclude with a new entry to ignore all files under e.g. for Linux /tmp/radicle/**.

It seems that this feature which was until now missing, is now kinda there but still buggy and I reported it as such to an issue assigned to a maintainer.

I'll wrap up my hopefully forwards-compatible implementation and ship it in our next release. The feature will start working if/when this bug is patched in a new VS Code version. Until then it is inert.

I urge anyone reading this to also please go upvote this related issue which needs to meet a minimum amount of upvotes until a deadline to be considered.

[maninak]

Good news, an MS staff engineer has accepted the bug report, added it to the May backlog and is assigned to it.

microsoft/vscode#157395 (comment)

[maninak]

After our (laborious) intervention the VS Code bug is fixed and should be published with their upcoming release beginning of May.

[sebastinez]

nice work @maninak kudos! 👏

[lorenzleutgeb]

If there are no temporary files, then they won't appear in the history, and we also won't need to hack around hiding them. See #128 for an implementation proposal.

[maninak]

Yup, that's been planned to be tackled next. Thank you for already taking a stab at it, Lorenz! 🙌

[lorenzleutgeb]

I just think that implementing all the hackery of hiding temporary files was more complicated than actually not creating temporary files and using Git instead, which is the cleaner solution.

[maninak]

Results:

🚀 Enhancements

• settings: add config to toggle excluding temporary files created by the extension, e.g. those used to produce the diff of a patch's changed files, from the list of recently opened files. This is enabled by default. This currently works only partly, but should automatically be fully working when the underlying VS Code bug is fixed and released (ETA beginning of May).

[maninak]

As of the published stable version of VS Code 1.90 this solution is in effect.