vscode-icons: tsOfficial setting is ignored

@robertohuertasm None taken and absolutely fair point!

My biggest issue with this is discoverability and the way this differs from my (and I’m naively presuming other users’) expectation of how settings in VS Code work. I have not ever seen another built-in VS Code setting or extension setting that required me to execute a manual task without me explicitly prompting about it. And I really customize a lot of things 🙂

The only things that I have experienced so far are were extensions that either required me to reload/restart or click a button in the toast that showed after I changed a setting. The way vscode-icons handles this right now is in my opinion not optimally designed as it goes against everything I’m used to since the time I started using VS Code. I strongly disagree with you on this:

The idea of leaving this process completely unobstrusive was to not annoy the user with every time she changes the configuration.

While I agree that it’s a good goal to be unobtrusive, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to show a toast when a user manually changes a setting. Realistically, how often does a user change a preset? And when they do, are there many cases where they would not want to apply them?

My point boils down to this: It’s all good that this is documented and the documentation well written and clear but in my view, a well-designed system should be usable without having to read the documentation.

But then again, maybe this isn’t a problem for other users at all? The lack of other Issues about the same problem surprised me, so maybe I’m totally wrong here 🙂

The think is that vscode itself uses the detection technic, upon saving the settings file, to enable/disable its features and settings. And this is what the user expects as a UX from the extensions as well. So @lumaxis has a strong point. On the other hand, we had our shares of complaints about being intrusive and we are now very cautious with it. There is also an issue on vscode about extensions messages being too annoying.

1. React only to changes affecting vscode-icons settings

I’m confident that this is achievable.

1. Allow the user to turn on/off this behavior.

This is the tricky part.

It’s possible, indeed, as seen here but we should be very careful with this as we don’t want to show a prompt for any modification happening in the configuration files. The idea of leaving this process completely unobstrusive was to not annoy the user with prompts every time she changes the configuration.

From my point of view, @lumaxis not getting the thing to work was because a) he didn’t look deep into the docs or b) the docs are not clear enough. No offense @lumaxis but I lean to a) as the docs are very clear in this regard and the note is just behind the preset explanation:

That being said, if I would have to develop this I would make this like the show welcome message prompt and allow the user to avoid showing this more than once if she wants.