Rust Cargo External Libraries

A small VSCode extension that adds a Rust External Libraries tree to the Explorer panel.

It is designed for Rust projects, Cargo workspaces, multi-project folders, and Remote-WSL workspaces.

Features

• Discovers Cargo.toml files recursively below each VS Code workspace folder.
• Resolves each manifest to its Cargo workspace root with cargo locate-project --workspace.
• Supports a parent folder containing multiple parallel Rust/Cargo projects.
• Deduplicates Cargo workspace members so one Cargo workspace is shown only once.
• Runs cargo metadata --format-version=1 --manifest-path ... for each discovered Cargo workspace.
• Groups external dependencies by registry, git, and path.
• Expands dependency source directories directly from Cargo's real cache/checkouts.
• Opens files by clicking in the tree.
• Refreshes when Cargo.toml or Cargo.lock changes.
• Shows rust-std when rust-src is installed.
• Supports Ctrl+Click / F12 from dependency names in Cargo.toml to dependency source.
• Isolates metadata failures so one broken Cargo project does not hide other projects.

Requirements

Inside the VSCode extension host environment, these commands must be available:

cargo --version
rustc --version

For standard library source:

rustup component add rust-src

For WSL projects, install/run this extension in the WSL extension host.

Usage

You can open a Rust project directly:

gmv/
  Cargo.toml

You can also open a parent folder containing multiple parallel Rust projects:

rust/
  gmv/
    Cargo.toml
  gmv-center/
    Cargo.toml
  demo/
    Cargo.toml

In that case, Rust External Libraries groups dependencies by Cargo project/workspace:

Rust External Libraries
  gmv
    registry
    git
    path
    rust-std
  gmv-center
    registry
    git
    path
    rust-std

For a normal Cargo workspace, member manifests are deduplicated and shown as one workspace:

gmv/
  Cargo.toml
  guard/
    Cargo.toml
  session/
    Cargo.toml

In Cargo.toml, use Ctrl+Click or F12 on dependency names such as:

[dependencies]
tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] }
bytes = "1"

The extension prefers src/lib.rs when available; otherwise it opens the dependency Cargo.toml.

Notes

This extension does not modify your Rust projects and does not create symlinks. It only discovers Cargo projects, reads Cargo metadata, and opens files from Cargo's dependency cache or path dependencies.

Configuration

{
  "rustExternalLibraries.includeHiddenFiles": false,
  "rustExternalLibraries.includeTargetDir": false,
  "rustExternalLibraries.maxDirectoryEntries": 500,
  "rustExternalLibraries.preferLibRsForCargoTomlDefinition": true
}