Contribute to the initial debug view

[connor4312]

microsoft/vscode#85548

[isidorn]

Let me know if you need help with this.
I would be interested in your feedback before I start talking to other debug extension authors about their adoption.

[connor4312]

I'll start looking at this today/tomorrow 🙂

[connor4312]

Observations while implementing:

• It would be nice to be able to contribute to the "run and debug" quickpick more explicitly. For instance, I could put auto-discovered npm scripts there, instead of needing a separate button for it.
• Noticed that launching the debug terminal through Run and Debug felt weird. I cleared out its "languages" array so that it's never suggested that way.
• Not having programmatic control over the welcome view may make things difficult for some implementors. For instance--while I'm fine having npm scripts behind the Run and Debug button--if I did want a top-level button for that, I could not control the visibility of it based on e.g. whether a package.json is present. I think this might become more of a concern with the change to show the welcome view whenever there isn't a debug session (will discuss more on that PR)
• It'd be nice to be able to control the presence of buttons based on languages present in the workspace, rather than the last opened file. If I mix languages on a project, it may be a little confusing to figure out when different buttons are visible/hidden.

We now contribute a button to open the debug terminal when the debugStartLanguage is js/ts

[isidorn]

1. I believe this issue captures what you want Allow debug extensions to provide configurations to display in Select and Start Debugging vscode#88230
2. Makes sense. Debug termianl should not be part of the Run and Debug
3. You should be able to control the visibile via context keys. We could introduce a context keys based on if a package.json is present. I do not think an extension can contribute context keys
4. vscode has no notion of a languages present in a project. This seems like a general vs code request

Great, button looks sexy! I would just remove the word any from the sentence, I think the flow of the sentence would be nicer without it.

fyi @weinand

[weinand]

Why is this terminal called the "Debug Terminal" or the "JavaScript Debug Terminal"?
This makes it appear overly generic and misleading.

The way it works restricts it to Node.js and the description seems to confirm this: "...to instantly debug any Node.js scripts you run".

Consequently I suggest to call it "Node.js Terminal".

BTW, we could actually try to create a real generic "Debug Terminal". In that case different debug extensions would contribute their "injection mechanism" to a generic "Debug Terminal". But the current "Debug Terminal" doesn't support this so I'm for "Truth in advertising" ;-)

@isidorn @roblourens @egamma your opinion?

[isidorn]

Agree, Debug is too specific. Users might be confused as to why that button disapears when I want to use the terminal to debug my python scripts.

[connor4312]

Thanks for the feedback, good point about other languages. I'll update it for today's nightly 🙂