Extension Sorter

See your installed extensions in the order you actually installed them — and open the real details page in one click.

English | 简体中文

VS Code can sort your extensions by install date, but only inside the built-in Extensions view: you get one long list that mixes themes, tools and everything else, and there is no way to say "show me what I installed last week". Extension Sorter adds a second view next to it that is built for exactly that question.

Contents

• ✨ Highlights
• 🚀 Install
• 🧭 Usage
• 📅 Where the install date comes from
• 🧩 Settings
• 🔧 Commands
• 🔒 Privacy
• 🧪 Development
• 📝 Changelog
• 📄 License

✨ Highlights

🚀 Install

From the Marketplace — search for Extension Sorter in the Extensions view, or use the Marketplace page.

From a VSIX

code --install-extension extension-sorter-1.0.0.vsix

From source

git clone https://github.com/vaxicy/extension-sorter.git
cd extension-sorter
npm install
npm run compile

Then press F5 (Run Extension) to start an Extension Development Host, or npm run vsix to build an installable package.

Requires VS Code 1.80 or newer.

🧭 Usage

1. Click the Extension Sorter icon in the activity bar and open the Installed by Date view.
2. Use the buttons in the view title bar:
   • Sort Installed Extensions By… — Newest installed first, Oldest installed first, Name A-Z, Name Z-A
   • Filter Installed Extensions… — All extensions, Themes only, Non-theme extensions (each entry shows how many extensions it would leave)
   • Search Installed Extensions… — name, publisher and id are searched
   • Refresh Installed Extensions
3. Every row shows publisher · date · source, for example contoso · Oct 9, 2026 · Estimated. Hover it for the full picture: id, version, theme count, folder path and a sentence that explains how trustworthy the date is.
4. Click a row to open the native details page. Right-click for Open Extension Details, Copy Extension ID and Open in Marketplace (the last one for theme and extension rows).
5. The view header shows what you are looking at (98 extensions · Newest first, or 12 of 98 · Themes only + search "lilac" while a filter is active), so a forgotten filter cannot silently hide extensions.

Everything is also reachable from the command palette under Extension Sorter: — sort, filter, search, refresh and Reset Filters and Search (also offered directly in the view when the filter leaves nothing to show).

📅 Where the install date comes from

VS Code does not expose a public API for the install time, so Extension Sorter walks a chain and always tells you which step produced the date. The label next to the date is the honest answer to "can I trust this?".

Dates from VS Code's own records survive everything. Estimated and observed dates are remembered in the install history (globalState), which also keeps first-seen records for extensions that are no longer installed — so a removed extension does not silently lose its date. Records older than extensionSorter.installHistoryRetentionDays are dropped (180 days by default, at most 2000 entries are kept).

🧩 Settings

🔧 Commands

🔒 Privacy

Extension Sorter reads the extensions that are already installed: vscode.extensions.all, the package.json of each extension, the creation time of its folder, its icon, and its own globalState. That is all.

• No telemetry, no analytics, no account, no network request.
• Nothing is uploaded anywhere; your extension list and your install dates stay on your machine.
• No code from your workspace is executed, so the extension works in Restricted Mode (untrusted workspaces) and in virtual workspaces.

🧪 Development

npm install          # dependencies
npm run compile      # tsc -> out/
npm test             # type check + 55 unit tests
npm run test:integration   # runs inside a real VS Code, three phases
npm run vsix         # build extension-sorter-<version>.vsix (+ copy for upload)

test:integration starts your local VS Code three times with an isolated profile: write and read drive a real editor through a generated helper extension to verify that the sort order and the install history survive a restart, and suite runs the mocha suite that covers command registration, the view and tree rendering, the native details command and the install-date/icon resolution.

💡 Note about the persistence phases: VS Code keeps all of its storage in memory (:memory: SQLite) as soon as --extensionTestsPath is passed, so a mocha test can never observe what a previous run wrote. That is why the restart check runs as a normal editor launch instead — see src/test/integration/stateDriver.ts.

📝 Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md. The first release, 1.0.0, is the complete feature set described above.

📄 License

Non-Commercial License © vaxicy

• ✅ Use it, modify it and share it for personal, study, research and other non-commercial purposes
• ✅ Keep the copyright notice and the license text with it
• ❌ No commercial use without a separate license: selling it, shipping it inside a commercial product or using it for business operations is not allowed
• ❌ The author provides no warranty and is not liable for any damage

Need it commercially? Ask the author for a commercial license.