Colorful Recent Files: Vertical Tabs & History

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A focused VS Code extension that presents your recently opened and edited files in a dedicated Activity Bar TreeView, with native time-based heat decoration, three grouping modes, and a vertical-tabs mode.

Features

• 🕒 Automatic tracking: records files when you switch to, open, or save them. History is stored in workspaceState — no network access, no external service.
• 📑 Vertical tabs (Sync with Open Tabs): when enabled, the view lists only your open editor tabs, so it works as a fast vertical tab bar. Closing a tab from the view closes the editor tab too; your historical access log is preserved and reappears when you turn sync off.
• 📁 Three grouping modes:
  • Flat — a single recent-files list.
  • Directory — grouped by folder path.
  • Type — grouped by extension in uppercase (TS, JSON, MD, OTHER). Pure-numeric extensions are bucketed by length: 1–3 digits, 4–6 digits, 7+ digits.
• 📌 Pinnable groups with manual ordering: hover a Folder or Type group and click the inline pin button that appears on the right of the group row. Pinned groups move to the top, show a 📌 marker, and keep a manual order you can drag to change. Unpinned groups always follow below the pinned block, sorted by most recent activity (following your Time Metric setting).
• 🎨 Three color schemes: rankSpectrum (default, smooth rainbow by rank), timeBucket (age-based steps), or plainText (neutral text, color dots only).
• 🖱️ Multi-select and drag out: Ctrl/Cmd-click or Shift-click several files, then drag them to an editor or any drop target that accepts text/uri-list. The payload is plain file: URIs (one per line, CRLF-separated, deduplicated), so the target sees real filesystem paths.
  • Not supported: the built-in File Explorer. This is a hard VS Code platform limitation, not an extension bug — the Explorer rejects any in-window tree drag at the dragover stage (if (o instanceof Lvt) return !1; in workbench.desktop.main.js), and no MIME or resourceUri change can bypass it. To move files between folders, cut and paste in the Explorer instead.
• 🗂️ Rich context menu: close/pin/split/move actions that mirror the editor tab menu in Sync mode, plus reveal, terminal, find-in-folder, and copy-path actions.
• 🎨 Native decorations everywhere (optional): turn on Style Native Explorer to apply the same heat colors to the built-in Explorer tree and editor tabs.

Screenshots

Flat list	Directory grouping	Type grouping

Pinned groups	Color dot icons	Plain text scheme

Vertical tabs mode	View menu	Context menu

Rank numbers appear exactly once

The file item's description shows only the relative time (e.g. just now, 11m, 13h). The rank is drawn by the native FileDecoration badge on the far right of the row — it is not repeated in the text.

When Style Native Explorer is on, the same decoration is applied to the built-in Explorer and to editor tabs, but color only, without the rank badge, so it never collides with file diagnostics or Git indicators.

Visual styles: native file icons vs color dots

1. Native file icons (default): keeps your VS Code file icon theme (Seti, Material, …). Recency is shown by the decoration color and the rank badge.
2. Color dot icons (showColorDotIcon): replaces file icons in the view with smooth SVG color dots. Dot colors use piecewise linear interpolation and adapt to light and dark themes.

To enable color dots:

• Settings UI: open Settings (Ctrl+, / Cmd+,), search for Colorful Recent Files: Show Color Dot Icon, and tick the box.
• settings.json:

  "codeColorfulRecentFiles.showColorDotIcon": true
  

Reading the view menu

The ... menu in the view title uses two notations:

• Multi-choice items (Name: <emoji> Current ➜ Next): the emoji marks the current value; the value after the arrow is what you get when you click, and it cycles back to the first value after the last one.
  • Group by: ✖️ None ➜ Type → currently None; click to switch to Type.
  • Items: Group by, Color Scheme, Time Metric.
• Toggles (Name / Name <emoji>): a trailing emoji means enabled; no emoji means disabled. Click to flip.
  • Sync with Open Tabs → off; Sync with Open Tabs ✔️ → on.
  • Color Dot Icons 🟣 and Style Native Explorer 🫟 follow the same rule.

Settings

Color customization

This extension contributes six color tokens (colorfulRecentFiles.heat1 … heat6) with fixed, theme-independent defaults, so file colors stay consistent across color themes. You can override them with workbench.colorCustomizations:

"workbench.colorCustomizations": {
  "colorfulRecentFiles.heat1": "#EF8773",
  "colorfulRecentFiles.heat2": "#CD861A",
  "colorfulRecentFiles.heat3": "#E0B97F",
  "colorfulRecentFiles.heat4": "#86CF86",
  "colorfulRecentFiles.heat5": "#57A3F8",
  "colorfulRecentFiles.heat6": "#AD80D7"
}

Note: VS Code registers contributed colors only when the window starts. If you install the extension into an already-running window, colors fall back to built-in tokens for that session and switch to the heat tokens after a window reload or a color theme change.

Commands

All commands live in the Recent Files category. The tables below summarize the commands you reach from the UI; the command palette exposes the toggles and cycles directly (Refresh, Clear History, Open File, Remove from History, plus the Group by / Color Scheme / Time Metric cycles and the Sync with Open Tabs / Color Dot Icons / Style Native Explorer toggles).

View title (... menu)

Right-click on a file (Sync mode)

Close Tab · Close Other Tabs · Close Saved Tabs · Close All Tabs · Pin / Unpin Tab · Open to the Side · Split Right · Split Down · Move to New Window · Remove from History · Reveal in Explorer · Reveal in OS · Copy Path · Copy Relative Path

Right-click on a file (history mode)

Open to the Side · Remove from History · Reveal in Explorer · Reveal in OS · Copy Path · Copy Relative Path

Group row inline button

Pin Group / Unpin Group — appears on the right of a Folder or Type group row on hover. Pinning and unpinning are inline buttons only; they are not items in the right-click menu.

Right-click on a group

Close Tabs in Group (Sync mode) · Remove Group from History (history mode) · Open in Terminal · Find in Folder · Reveal in Explorer · Copy Path

Requirements and limitations

• Requires VS Code 1.85.0 or newer; desktop only (virtual workspaces are not supported).
• Works in untrusted workspaces: the extension only reads and writes extension state and never executes workspace code.
• Dragging into the built-in File Explorer is not possible for any extension (see above).

License

MIT