Need better extension management UI

[joaomoreno]

The quick open UI isn't working fully well.

We need to come up with a better UI story that can

• increase visibility of extensions;
• fix awkward UI interactions we have today (status bar widget, error output pane, messages, etc);
• enable us to implement more features in the future (enablement/disablement, statistics, etc).

[joaomoreno]

Let me present what I call the Global Extensions Viewlet solution.

The idea is to use the sidebar area to manage your extensions.

• Similar to viewlets you can get into it by clicking an icon in the activity bar.
• Contrary to viewlets, this icon would be separated from the existing ones, indicating that it is a global concept instead of a workspace relative concept.
• The user can search and browse through several categories: All, Installed, Gallery, Outdated, etc.
• Clicking on an extension would show its details in a split view below the list. An optional Read more button could open the extension's README.md file in preview mode in an editor pane.
• Notifications would be displayed globally in the icon in the sidebar, similar to the existing viewlets.
• More detailed notifications would be displayed inline in each extension's row in the list and the detail view as well.

I like this because it is minimal, practical and solves many of the currently existing issues. It can also be implemented on top of our existing infrastructure.

The main concerns surrounding this is the breakage of the parent-child hierarchy we have with viewlets. You click a file in the parent Explorer view and it opens an editor in the child view. All viewlets work that way. The concern is that this solution would be confusing since clicking an extension would not open any editor view. IMO this can be solved by displaying this sidebar in a different style: render it with a different background color for example. This would provide the user some indication that this pane is somehow different and thus behaves differently.

[Tyriar]

Any reason in particular that the extension's README would not display in the editor view on click? There is a lot of good content/images in many extensions that will barely fix in the sidebar.

[daviwil]

Looks cool! Don't you already have an extension's README in its Marketplace metadata? Seems like you could just automatically show the README for any of the selected extensions, but maybe I'm missing something there.