File Size Explorer
A VS Code extension that adds its own File Sizes icon to the Activity Bar, opening a sidebar that lists every file and folder in your workspace sorted by size — largest first by default — so you can spot what's eating up space without leaving the editor.
Features
- Dedicated sidebar view — its own Activity Bar icon opens a "File Sizes" panel, separate from the built-in Explorer, showing every file and folder ordered by size.
- Folder sizes are aggregated — a folder's size is the total of everything inside it, computed recursively, so large directories stand out even before you expand them.
- Click to open — clicking a file opens it, just like the native Explorer.
- Toggle sort direction — flip between largest-first and smallest-first from the view's title bar.
- Auto-refresh — the view updates automatically (debounced) when files are created, changed, or deleted.
- Exclude noisy folders —
node_modules, .git, build output, etc. are skipped by default and configurable.
Usage
- Open a folder or workspace in VS Code.
- Click the File Sizes icon in the Activity Bar (left-hand edge) to open the view.
- Click the sort icon in its title bar to toggle ascending/descending order, or the refresh icon to recompute sizes on demand.
Extension Settings
| Setting |
Description |
Default |
fileSizeExplorer.sortDescending |
Sort largest files and folders first |
true |
fileSizeExplorer.excludeNames |
File/folder names to skip entirely when computing sizes |
["node_modules", ".git", "out", "dist", "build", ".next", "target", "bin", "obj"] |
How it works
Folder sizes require walking the whole subtree, so the first time a directory's contents are listed, the extension recursively sums every file inside it (skipping anything in excludeNames). Results are cached per directory, so expanding folders you've already visited is instant — only the refresh command or a file-system change re-walks the tree.
Known Issues
Very large workspaces (tens of thousands of files) can take a moment to compute on first load, since every folder's aggregate size has to be known up front to sort the top level correctly.
Installation
Not yet published on the VS Code Marketplace. To build and run it from source:
git clone https://github.com/katalog/vscode-file-size-sidebar.git
cd vscode-file-size-sidebar
npm install
npm run compile
Then open the folder in VS Code and press F5 to launch an Extension Development Host with the extension active, or package it yourself with vsce and install the resulting .vsix via Extensions: Install from VSIX....
Release Notes
1.0.0
Stable release — no functional changes from 0.9.0.
0.9.0
Initial release: sorted file-size sidebar view with folder aggregation, sort toggle, and auto-refresh.
License
See LICENSE.
