Annoucement: Customize UI is probably not going to work anymore

[knopp]

VSCode added a build step that mangles all typescript private fields so they can't be reasonably accessed by Customize UI. This greatly reduces hooks that customize-ui can intercept and methods it can call.

It might still be possible to change font size, but other layout changes are probably gone. Or at least made much more difficult.

[knopp]

This is the PR that broke Customize UI, possibly forever

microsoft/vscode#166126

It was fun while it lasted.

[isidorn]

Hi VS Code PM here 👋

More details about this change and the motivation be found here microsoft/vscode-discussions#257
We would like to better understand if the Customize UI extension will no longer be able to work.
If that is indeed the case (as I believe it is) - we are open to a UI discussion to see if we can make possible some of the most popular Custmoize UI features. We would love to learn more from this extension and identify the gaps and shortcomings in our extensibility story with the goal of making our actual API more rich.

Thanks
Isidor

[knopp]

Hi @isidorn,

thank you for stopping by!

CustomizeUI is basically a pile of hacks that works by monkey-patching javascript in browser and main processes, which is something that regular extensions can not do, and probably for a good reason :)

Still, the problem the extension is solving is quite real and a lot of people seem to find it useful.

The primary reason why I wrote the extension was to be able to customize the user interface font and spacing. This is a feature that has been requested for a long time, the issue has over 2000 likes, and sadly it doesn't seem to be addressed any time soon.

Somewhat less important is to customize the rest of user interface. Right now the activity bar and titlebar are taking significant amount of space, especially on laptop screen, being able to do something like this (tabs in title bar and horizontal activity bar) is quite nice:

(sorry for the old screenshot)

And being able to modify the javascript directly allowed me to prototype user interface changes that would have very little chance to actually land in VSCode itself. Even crazy things, like status bar on top (it's actually surprisingly practical...)

[spacepluk]

especially on laptop screen, being able to do something like this (tabs in title bar and horizontal activity bar) is quite nice

FWIW this was the main reason I was using this extension. At least on macOS the default layout wastes a good amount of vertical space.

[isidorn]

@knopp thanks for providing more details and for explaining the use case.
We would love to learn more from you about what you think were the most successful UI features your extension did? I personally like the option to show the activity bar as part of the viewlet and I think this is something we should maybe give a try in VS Code.

As for the customising Font Size in the workbench - we are aware of this highly upvoted request, however there are technical limitations that @bpasero explained in that issue. What I would like to understand better is what is the main thing your users gain with being able to configure fonts that "Zoom In" does not give them? In what part of the UI are they most impacted with not being able to configure the font size?

Pinging @daviddossett our lead designer to consider some of the learnings from your extension.

[j-f1]

For me, I largely used Customize UI to move the status bar to the top and inject custom CSS to make some personal preference tweaks to the sizing of items in the UI. I think adding support for custom CSS as a user preference would go a long way toward alleviating the pain of breaking this extension.

I also used monkey-patch (which this extension depends on, and which has also been broken by this update as far as I can tell) in one of my own extensions because custom icon themes are required to bundle any fonts that they depend on, which is not possible for San Francisco due to restrictions by Apple. (I also had to inject some custom CSS because certain icons including the dirty icon on tab titles do not seem to properly use the codicon class name system to pick up custom icon themes).

[knopp]

What I would like to understand better is what is the main thing your users gain with being able to configure fonts that "Zoom In" does not give them? In what part of the UI are they most impacted with not being able to configure the font size?

Back when I wrote customize-ui zoom-in resulted in really bad wobble effect during scrolling for both the sidebar and text editor. That seems to be improved now.

[robertpiosik]

My usage of the extension is about changing font family in the interface (SegoeUI to Google Sans). What led me to this issue is that I found my overwritten ff is no longer applied for the context menu.

[DeltaRazero]

The activity bar just takes up a lot of space and clutters the UX for me, Having it be at the top (or bottom as some people like that too) is much cleaner.

I'm also linking this issue here, where it's already being requested. microsoft/vscode#118692

At least I know I don't have to update my VSCode anymore after the current version until either a workaround is found, or the extremely slim chance this gets implemented.

[robsontenorio]

@isidorn

"Inline titlebar on macOS" is the best feature!

[pje]

@isidorn

"Inline titlebar on macOS" is the best feature!

Agreed! There's a pretty popular issue for that request in the vscode repo: microsoft/vscode#12377