Can I programmatically open a directory when invoking opensshremotes.openEmptyWindow

[jasongonzales23]

Our extension connects users to remote environments, but our users are rightly complaining of a bad experience. This is because every time they connect to a remote, there are rituals they have to repeat. Among them are clicking "continue", agreeing that they trust the thing they are about to open and then finally navigating to the same folder every time. We put customer code into a directory called "projects." The thing is we can navigate to the folder for them if they come from the web. We simply pass that in as part of a vscode URL. That said, I don't see how we can do the same thing from within an extension. If this is possible via VScode URL it should be allowed from an extension IMO.

Furthermore, (and I realize this is a separate ask) it would be nice to give users the ability to "never do this again" with the other rituals as well. It's a bad experience for them.

[alefragnani]

Hi @jasongonzales23 ,

First, about the trust message. If you are talking about the Workspace Trust feature, I suppose the Remote extension has no special treatment on that matter. So, it simply inherits the VS Code setting. If that the case, and the user is annoyed about that AND it does trust on remotes, he/she could simply disable the security.workspace.trust.enabled setting. I'm not aware of any Remote specific trust setting, but I guess it would be a good feature request for VS Code.

About the API, It seems opensshremotes.openEmptyWindow does indeed support parameters, but not exactly what you need. Based on this issue (microsoft/vscode-remote-release#3552) you are able to pass some connection parameters, but not the folder you would like to navigate. Unfortunately, the Remote extensions are not open source, neither documented (for extension authors), so it will be hard to identify if the API has evolved.

I'm not sure the developers of that extension are aware of this Discussions repo (they weren't aware of the Slack channel), so I suggest you to ask your question on their repo as well (https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-remote-release/issues/).

[alefragnani]

The uri param is not a string, but a Uri object.

Try this:

const uri = vscode.Uri.parse(`vscode-remote://ssh-remote+${machineAddress}/home/folder/sub-folder`)
vscode.commands.executeCommand("vscode.openFolder", uri, {forceNewWindow: true});

If the path is not remote you could use vscode.Uri.file instead

Hope this helps

[jasongonzales23]

Thanks @alefragnani ! I tried exactly what you suggest above and got the "access denied public key" error. What's even stranger is that we have a flow that goes from the web where we simply offer a link on the web with the following:

 const remoteVsCodeUrl = `vscode://vscode-remote/ssh-remote+${machineAddress}/home/folder/sub-foilder`;

Click on that link from the web and VSCode behaves as we'd expect.

[alefragnani]

Not sure why this error message, unfortunately. I have no SSH available to try out right now.
But it's really weird that it works from the web, but not on desktop 😕

[jasongonzales23]

Hey @alefragnani I figured out the issue and thanks so much for the help. It may be a quirk of our implementation but I needed to add username@machineAddress for this all to work.

[alefragnani]

Good to know it is working!