☠️ Trigger Warning: Vibe Coded App Ahead ☠️

As a Solution Engineer at Microsoft a good chunk of my time is occupied with building PoC’s and demo solutions for customers. Most days I have 2 to 4 or sometimes more Visual Studio Code instances running and churning away on tasks for me.

To provide overwatch across my fleet of VS Code instances I’ve created vscdeck. It gives you floating bar with buttons for each VS Code instance, and provides visual feedback and instance switching gestures.

Here’s a demo:

This release is built for and tested on Windows. It’s available to clone on GitHub at https://github.com/microsoft/vscdeck.

Feature list:

  • Discovers VS Code instances and observes when instances are opened or closed
  • Works with local and SSH-remote VS Code instances with or without DevContainers
  • Provides large and compact modes for the button bar view that floats above other windows
  • Each button provides visual feedback for the following states:
    • Idle - Green
    • Running - Blue pulsing
    • Question - Yellow flashing
    • Done - Green flashing
  • Buttons can be reordered by dragging in Large mode
  • Customizable hot keys assigned to each instance - defaults to Ctrl+Shift+number
  • When not focused, the hot key or button focused the VS Code instance and focuses the Copilot chat text box
  • When the VS Code instance is already focused, the hot key toggles maximizing/ de-maximizing the window
  • If you use the Peacock extension or otherwise customize your UI colors the status.background color is shown as a stripe under the button in the button bar.

Clone it from GitHub at https://github.com/microsoft/vscdeck and give it a try.