Consider to adopt new createStatusBarItem API for id and name properties

[bpasero]

👋 Hi there, Ben here, from the VS Code team.

We just released VSCode 1.57 that landed a new stable API for status bar items to provide id and name properties: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_57#_status-bar-item-id-and-name-properties

I noticed that your extension is a consumer of the createStatusBarItem API.

Here is an example how using the new API will improve the user experience around managing status bar items:

Without id / name right clicking on the status bar item from your extension will show a generic label that is just the name of the extension:

As you can see from the example above, the GH Pull Request extension did not yet adopt this new API and as such, the menu only shows a generic entry (as opposed to the other entries that are more specific).

Another motivation to adopt this new API is that it will enable a user to selectively hide/show status bar entries from your extension in case you register more than one status bar item.

An adoption of the new API involves:

• configuring "engines": { "vscode": "^1.57.0" } in package.json
• where createStatusBarItem is called, add a unique id: string property as first parameter
• in the returned StatusBarItem set name to something that describes the intent of the status bar entry (if you provide multiple status bar entries, make sure the name is different for each entry)

Thanks for the support and the great work! ❤️

[dbaeumer]

@bpasero must the id be globally (VS Code wide) unique or inside the extension ?

[bpasero]

@dbaeumer inside the extension, we actually internally prefix with the extension id 👍

[bpasero]

Thanks!