PR 3200 forced us to have the discussion again, but given our '1.0' deliverables and other feature requests (such as Tabs), we had to push out the conversation.Īs we planned the August 2016 release, many of the top feature requests had been addressed and support for icons bubbled to the top: We left in the icon implementation in case we changed our minds in the future, but we never turned it on.įast forward to February 2016. We worried about maintaining 100+ icons and keeping them in sync with the Visual Studio IDE. To us, icons felt heavy and provided little value. The team loved the simple, clean look of an icon-less tree. When we started work on the 'Monaco' editor, icons in the Explorer didn't make the cut for a lightweight editor. was an intern in Zurich lab and spent a couple of hours hacking in a basic set of icons because he wanted to differentiate between files and folders when quickly glancing at the tree.
These words all describe the first time we added icons to the File Explorer tree in VS Code, back in 2014.
