Attempting to replicate NERDTree’s menu in VSCode.

I’ve been a pretty happy Vim user for a while, but I wanted to give VSCode a try but often give up because I miss too much from Vim. This time around I made a list of things I wanted to be able to do in VSCode that I missed from Vim and one of the things on my list was the menu in NERDTree.

I looked around a little and couldn’t find anything similar so tried to play with the settings in VSCode. I was able to replicate some functionality (keyboard shortcuts to do different actions in the File Explorer view) but it didn’t quite feel the same. My muscle memory missed being able to hit ‘m’ while in File Explorer and then quickly select what I was going to do next.

As I’ve been trying to build more and also was curious about the internals of VSCode, I thought this was a good opportunity to build a plugin to help close this gap for me and learn a little bit more about how VSCode worked under the hood. A few days later and I’ve got my first published plugin vscode-file-explorer-menu (VSCode market place link here).

It’s a little hacky, but I’m pretty happy with it for now as it does what I missed from my Vim flow and am hopeful it’s useful to others.