Pinned & Recent Folders

Jump to the folders you most recently worked in — and pin your favourites.

If you keep a lot of folders in one workspace (dated outputs, generated bundles, per-project subdirs…), the file tree gets slow to navigate. This adds a status-bar button that opens a quick-pick of your folders, in two groups:

• 📌 Pinned — folders you pinned, kept on top, persisted across reloads.
• 🕘 Recent — sorted by the freshest file inside each folder, so the one you just edited is on top.

Pick one → it opens in your file explorer (or a new VSCode window). Pin/unpin with the button on each row.

Why "freshest file inside"

A folder's own modified-time only changes when files are added/removed/renamed in it — editing an existing file doesn't bump it. This extension scans each folder's files and ranks by the newest one, so "Recent" reflects what you actually touched.

Configure which folders

Set folderNav.folders to glob patterns (relative to the workspace root). * = any one folder, ** = any depth.

// top-level subfolders (default)
"folderNav.folders": ["*"]

// folders under src/
"folderNav.folders": ["src/*"]

// a deeper, specific tree
"folderNav.folders": ["agents/*/content/*", "agents/*/draft/*"]

// everything (junk dirs like node_modules/.git are skipped)
"folderNav.folders": ["**"]

Use

• Status-bar button Folders (bottom-right) → click → pick → opens in Explorer.
• Command palette: Folders: Open a Folder · Open Today's Folder (date-named folders) · Open a Folder in New Window.
• In the picker, click a row's pin button to pin/unpin it.

Settings

Install

From the Marketplace (search “Pinned & Recent Folders”) or:

ext install andrewaltair.pinned-recent-folders

Or grab the .vsix from Releases → Extensions → ⋯ → Install from VSIX….

No network, no telemetry. Pure fs + VSCode API.

License

MIT © Andrew Altair