▶ Task & Script Explorer
Every script in your workspace, and everything currently running, in one list. Start, stop and
restart without ever going looking for a terminal tab.
Change log 0.9.0
- Added custom tasks: open the ⋮ menu in the panel header and pick + Create custom task.
Extension Features
- 📋 A panel in the left bar — every task of the workspace as a
tree, grouped by the manifest it came from. Nothing moves when a task starts, and the number of
running tasks rides on the activity bar icon as a real VS Code badge.
- ⚡ A button in every editor's toolbar — the ▶ icon, so the
whole list is one click away from wherever you happen to be.
- ⌨️ A hotkey, from anywhere — Ctrl+Cmd+T
(Ctrl+Alt+T on Windows and Linux) opens the whole list without
touching the mouse, from the editor, the terminal, anywhere.
- 🔍 Search that matches the command too — type
vitest and find the script that runs it, not
just the ones called "test". Enter toggles a task, Shift+Enter
restarts it.
- ✏️ Rename any row, and any heading —
dev becomes API server, and the
group titled @acme/api-gateway becomes Gateway. Display only: the project's
manifest is never edited, and the real name stays visible beside it and searchable.
- 🖍️ Paint a row — right-click → Change Colour… → one of fifteen, on a task
or on a whole folder, each drawn as a circle in its own colour. The list stops being one colour of
text and starts being a map of what is yours, what is loud and what you never touch.
- 🖼️ Any icon your icon pack has — right-click → Change Icon…: the icons VS Code
ships with first, then every icon of whichever file icon theme you run — Material Icon Theme,
vscode-icons — each drawn in the list with its own artwork. Picked by name, so switching packs
keeps your choice.
- ⭐ Favorites — star the two or three scripts you actually run and they sit as
loose rows at the very top of the tree, above everything, with no heading to open first and
without leaving the package they belong to.
- ↕️ Drag rows into the order you want — inside a package, or among the
starred rows. The order is remembered per workspace and the manifests are never edited.
- 🎨 Colour and an icon per task — ▶ for dev servers, a beaker for tests, a rocket for releases,
a database for migrations, decided by what the task really runs — and your own rules
come first.
- 🧩 Eleven ecosystems, one list —
package.json, deno.json, Cargo.toml,
Makefile.toml, pyproject.toml, Pipfile, tox.ini, noxfile.py, Makefile, justfile,
Taskfile.yml, go.mod, composer.json, mise.toml, docker-compose.yml, Dockerfile and the
shell scripts every repository accumulates, so a mixed monorepo is still one list.
- 🐳 Docker Compose, as rows — every compose file in the workspace, including
the profile-named ones, with
up fanned out per service and down, build, logs and ps
beside it. ▶ and ■ live on the file's own heading, so a stack goes up and comes down without
opening it, and the heading spins while any part of it runs. Check Containers asks Docker what
is really up — including stacks you started from a terminal or with up -d — and ■ then stops
them.
- 🏗️ Dockerfiles, as one row each — every
Dockerfile, Dockerfile.dev and
api.Dockerfile in the workspace. ▶ on the file's own row builds it and ☰ beside it holds the
rest — one build per FROM … AS <stage>, plus run and whatever else dockerfileCommands names —
so a file is a line rather than a folder, and the row spins while a build runs. The image is tagged
after the folder it sits in, so a build leaves something you can run rather than a dangling id.
- 💻 Shell scripts, as tasks —
.sh, .bash, .zsh and .ksh, and on Windows
.ps1, .bat and .cmd, picked up from scripts/, bin/ and the workspace root at any depth.
Each project's scripts gather under one shell folder with a terminal icon, a row no category
claimed wears the shell it is read by, the dimmed text is the script's own first comment, and each
extension is started by the runner that can start it. Add to Terminal puts the command line in a fresh
terminal unrun, for when a script takes arguments.
- ✍️ Custom tasks — a name and a shell command of your own,
docker compose down -v && docker compose up -d db included, under one Custom Tasks heading at
the top of the tree. ⋮ → Create custom task makes the first, the heading's + the rest. Kept in
.vscode/task-script-explorer.json: commit it for the team, or keep it to yourself.
- 🧠 Knows how to run things — npm, yarn, pnpm, bun or deno detected per
package from
packageManager, the lock files and engines; everything else named by the table it
is declared in.
- ⏹ Stop all / restart all — kill five watchers before a rebase, or bring the whole stack back
up after switching branches, in one click.
- 👀 Running tasks this extension did not start — from
tasks.json, other extensions or the
built-in npm list — are shown and can be stopped from the same place.
Tasks scatter. A monorepo buries them across a dozen package.json files, the Rust service next to
them keeps its own in a Makefile.toml, the Python one in pyproject.toml, and there is a
justfile at the root that half the team forgets exists. The stack everything talks to is a
docker-compose.yml two folders away, and the half-dozen scripts/*.sh nobody has opened since they
were written are how the release actually goes out. The dev server you started an hour ago is
alive in a tab you can no longer find, and running anything by hand means getting the directory
and the tool right first. Task & Script Explorer collapses all of that into one list, and gives you
three ways to reach it.
Full documentation —
what gets scanned, how each ecosystem is run, every row, button and setting explained.
Visual Studio Code Marketplace link: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=DenysDavydov.task-runner-ultimate
Open VSX Registry link: https://open-vsx.org/extension/DenysDavydov/task-runner-ultimate
Try another useful extension: AI Browser🏆 Claude + Codex.
Visual Studio Code Marketplace link: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=DenysDavydov.tab-browser-ultimate-promo
Open VSX Registry link: https://open-vsx.org/extension/DenysDavydov/tab-browser-ultimate
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