Provide API to access and change editor tab labels

[chengjianhua]

Feature Request

The Atom has the ability to customize the tabs, it's so powerful for some requirements. For example, there is an extension nice-index in Atom that could be able to rename tabs of many opened editors have same name index.js, rename them to the names of their parent folder.

It's very useful that if we could do so.

@bpasero I got it that the feature requested by #32836 will not be considered in the first half year of 2018. I think my feature request is very similar with that, so may I ask you when the ability to customize tabs in VSC would be added into the roadmap ?

I was excited when I start to think how can I implement a extension like nice-index in VSC, but after I involved in the documents about customizing a VSC extension, I just found that I can not achieve this. I hope that you could consider this feature request, thanks for all of your great works ~ 🙏

[bpasero]

@chengjianhua can you give more details about what you would want to change on the tabs from your extension?

[chengjianhua]

@bpasero I want to there is an api that I can leverage it to get the file paths of all active editors, and then use the file paths to generate the custom labels for active editors.

According to the setting.json in VSC, I guess this is similar with workbench.editor.labelFormat, but more customizable. What I want is to change the return value of getTabLabels(). I'm not very sure about this, I just take time less than one half hour to search the source codes for replying you in time.

// Controls the format of the label for an editor. Changing this setting can for example make it easier to understand the location of a file:
// - short:   'parent'
// - medium:  'workspace/src/parent'
// - long:    '/home/user/workspace/src/parent'
// - default: '.../parent', when another tab shares the same title, or the relative workspace path if tabs are disabled
"workbench.editor.labelFormat": "default",

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/blob/204f0482da3e887ad4a852a87aa9ab6079aefda4/src/vs/workbench/browser/parts/editor/tabsTitleControl.ts#L380

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/blob/204f0482da3e887ad4a852a87aa9ab6079aefda4/src/vs/workbench/browser/parts/editor/tabsTitleControl.ts#L292

[chengjianhua]

@usernamehw the parent in workbench.editor.labelFormat does not mean the name of parent folder.

If you think that my this requirement could be covered by adding an option in workbench.editor.labelFormat, I'd like to accept that. For further scalability, providing a interface for this would be better. For example, the aforementioned image shows that there is an slash / before the name of parent folder that indicates this is a index.js file in /Parent folder.

If I want change the slash / to other symbols, the api is needed. The options are preset for normal users, api for users that want more customizations and the possibility of implementing some interesting ideas.

[DanTup]

This came up for Dart too: Dart-Code/Dart-Code#577

When a user F12's into a file that's in an external library, the filename is often fairly vague. It'd be nice if we could insert the packages name into the tab title text so it's more obvious to the user the package that they're in code for.

[ncallaway]

I just ran into the same exact issue with as the parent poster. I was having the same usability problem with duplicated index.js files, and went looking for a solution. Finding no VSC extensions that would help in the marketplace I dug into the documentation along the exact same lines as chengjianhua. I too was disappointed to find that it was not possible to update the content of the editor tabs in any way from the extension API.

I also have the same issue to a lesser extent in rust when dealing with mod.rs files.

The current functionality provided by VSC of showing the folder in a de-emphasized label is helpful, but not as helpful as it could be, as I actually care more about the folder name than the file name in these cases.

What I'd like to be able to modify through an extension is:

• The text-content of the title label of the tab (index.js in the screenshot; this is the highest priority item)
• The text-content of the hint label of the tab (.../SharedHeader in the screenshot; this would be a secondary priority, but I can't imagine it's that much more work than providing API access to the title label)
• The icon displayed in the tab (JS in the screenshot; this is personally a low-priority for me, and I'm including it more for completeness)

[karlhorky]

Found this open issue after extensive searching (lots of closed issues about this already), and it looks like a good option for allowing being able to control the tab titles and labels.

The current behavior (even after all merged pull requests trying to fix the problem) is a big problem in Node projects, where index.js files are all over the place. My editor often looks like this:

Alternately, if an open, extensible API is too much to consider now, I would suggest re-considering #30316 (related to #27328), which also provides a solution to the index.js problem.

cc @bpasero @sohlex @rosyatrandom