Color tabs based on directory

[qpwo]

Problem: forgetting your folder

When editing a workspace that has very different directories, such as client and server, it's easy to accidentally write insecure code if you think you're in client when you're in server.

Solution: Assign a color to a directory/folder in project and color the tab/file everywhere

Right click on a folder and click 'color directory'. This adds a line to your settings.json:

{
    "workbench.colorCustomizations": {
         "directories": {
             "server": "red",
             "client": "blue",
         }
    }
}

The tab's / file's color will be shown in explorer, git diff, the tab on top, ctrl-tab, and command-p.

See also

• Colored Tabs #135082 : They propose a more modest and less useful solution of colorizing specific files
• https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=orepor.color-tabs-vscode-ext : can only colorize title bar & status bar based on folder. I don't think it would be possible for an extension to do all the colorizations necessary.

[NotWearingPants]

Sounds useful, but this should use general glob paths rather then just directories. This way you can color specific file extensions in different colors.

[qpwo]

Also related to #62432 #38857 #62104 #97146 #28717 #31308 #21030 #10748 #66640 #92050 #108667 #115792 #124982 #121738 #126689 #129033 #74404 #75719 #35379 . I would judge there is significant demand for this feature.

[mark-pictor-csec]

My use case would be to color tabs based on which "project folder" the file was under, where project folder means a top level folder in the workspace (not sure if there's a better name).

This would allow me to tell at a glance which repo/project a file belonged to, without having to click the tab and look at the displayed path.

To generate unique but persistent colors, I would hash the folder path (or workspace name + folder name) and use the first 3 bytes as the color. It'd also be nice to be able to override the colors - perhaps based on regex - in the settings file. This would mean the colors were still useful even if two folders resulted in very similar hashes.

Another option for folder colors would be to use git's upstream repo url (part of the output of git remote -v show) as the hash input.