FileScope

A file is more than its name and its size. FileScope keeps the properties you care about in the status bar, and puts everything the file system knows one click away.

Why another file properties extension

Most of them stop at size and modification time. FileScope answers the questions that actually come up:

Who owns this file? deploy (1001) and staff (20), not a pair of bare numbers you then have to look up. Names are resolved through the system's own account database — which matters on macOS, where local users live in Directory Services and never appear in /etc/passwd.

When was it created? Creation time is its own property, never quietly substituted with the metadata change time. Where the file system genuinely records none, the property is absent rather than filled with a fake.

What are the permissions, exactly? -rw-r--r-- · 0644, with setuid, setgid and sticky bits folded into the execute positions the way ls -l writes them — so a 4755 never looks like a 755.

Does any of this survive on a remote host? Yes. FileScope runs where the files are, so over Remote-SSH, WSL, Dev Containers and Codespaces it reports the remote file system rather than your laptop's.

The status bar

You choose what appears and in which order, through filescope.statusBar.items:

"filescope.statusBar.items": ["permissions", "owner", "size", "mtime"]
// -rw-r--r-- | deploy | 1.22 KiB | 2026-08-09 03:56:04 (M)

Available entries are type, permissions, owner, group, size, atime, mtime, ctime and birthtime. Hovering shows a summary; clicking opens the full panel.

The display keeps up on its own. Saving the file, changing it from a terminal, a rebase touching it, a chmod in another window — all of it refreshes without you asking.

The details panel

Everything stat reports: type, size in both human and exact form, permissions in symbolic and octal, ownership, all four timestamps with relative ages, hard link count, inode, device, allocated blocks and preferred I/O block size. Symbolic links report their target and whether it still resolves.

The layout follows the panel width — stacked in a narrow column beside the editor, two columns when there is room.

Settings

Two commands are contributed, both available from the Command Palette: FileScope: Show File Properties and FileScope: Refresh File Properties.

Install

code --install-extension banochkin.filescope

Or find FileScope in the Extensions view.

Working on a remote host? Install it on the remote side — the Extensions view offers Install in SSH: … for exactly this. A copy installed only locally will stay dormant, because the properties this extension exists to show are the ones only the machine holding the file can answer.

Platform notes

Creation time. Not every file system records one. APFS and NTFS do; several Linux file systems either do not, or report the metadata change time in its place, which is indistinguishable from the real thing at the API level.

Windows. There are no POSIX permission bits or ownership to report, so those entries are skipped rather than filled with a synthesised mode that says nothing about the actual ACL. A read-only row takes their place, and the inode becomes the file index.

Ownership lookups cost one short-lived process per uid/gid pair, cached afterwards. Set filescope.ownership.resolveNames to false to keep the raw numbers and skip it entirely.

Virtual workspaces. When the file system is a provider rather than a disk — GitHub Repositories, for instance — only type, size and the timestamps that provider reports are available. The panel says so plainly instead of rendering the absent fields as zeroes.

Requirements

VS Code 1.96.0 or later.

Development

npm install
npm run watch    # esbuild and tsc, both watching
npm run lint
npm test

F5 launches an Extension Development Host.

About

Built and maintained by banochkin.com DAO.

Credits

FileScope began as a fork of dsyx/vsc-file-properties by Yaoxing Shan and keeps its MIT licence. The rewrite that followed is documented in CHANGELOG.md.