Adds an "Extension Health" view to the Activity Bar that lists your installed VS Code
extensions grouped by Deprecated, Stale, Disabled but installed, and
Healthy, using Marketplace "last updated" data, deprecation flags, and (optionally)
GitHub last-commit recency.
This is a personal/community tool, not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.
Screenshots
Inline mode (details shown next to each extension name):
Dropdown mode (click an extension to expand its details as a child row):
How it works
Installed extensions (including disabled ones) are found by scanning your local
~/.vscode/extensions folder directly and reading each extension's own
package.json. This list is cross-referenced against vscode.extensions.all, which
the VS Code API only populates with enabled extensions — anything on disk but
missing from that list is treated as disabled.
"Last updated" / deprecated flag come from VS Code Marketplace's internal Gallery
query API (.../_apis/public/gallery/extensionquery). This endpoint is not a
public, documented API — it's the same one the Extensions view itself uses
internally, but its request/response shape could change or break at any time without
notice.
GitHub last-commit date (optional enrichment) is looked up via the public GitHub
REST API when a repository link is available. Unauthenticated requests are limited to
60/hour, which is easy to exhaust with a large extension list. Run the
Extension Health: Set GitHub Token command to store a personal access token in
VS Code's secret storage and raise that limit to 5000/hour. No token is required for
the view to work — GitHub data is simply skipped once rate-limited.
Settings
extensionHealth.staleMonths — months since the last Marketplace update before an
extension is considered stale (default 12).
extensionHealth.excludedExtensions — extension IDs to exclude from health checks.
Known limitations
Desktop only (uses Node fs/network APIs) — does not run on vscode.dev/web.
No automated "these two extensions do the same thing" detection — that requires
reading descriptions/READMEs and isn't reliably automatable from metadata alone.
No programmatic enable/disable — only "Open in Marketplace" and "Uninstall" are
offered, since there's no supported public API for toggling extensions.
Remote development hosts (SSH/WSL/Containers) are not yet handled; only the local
~/.vscode/extensions folder is scanned.
