project panel: Allow showing both folder icons and open/closed arrows

[yayashn]

Describe the feature

We need folder open/closed arrows. Icon-only approaches are very hard to navigate especially when someone has been used to folder arrows. Currently takes me around 20x longer to browse the explorer as I have to carefully analyse every single icon to know if it's a folder or not (combined with the fact that the icons are monochrome but that has been mentioned in other issues).

For someone who is used to folder arrows and/or colour coded icons, the editor is very hard to use & has a high barrier to entry without investing a lot of mental resources to get used to absence of these features.

If applicable, add mockups / screenshots to help present your vision of the feature

[Moshyfawn]

This can potentially be combined with #4915.

[JosephTLyons]

@yayashn, we do have this setting:

  "project_panel": {
    "folder_icons": false
  },

Which removes the folder icon and uses an arrow:

But it does not show both the folder and the arrow; currently, only one can be configured to be shown.

Is this enough to satisfy what you're looking for?

[yayashn]

@yayashn, we do have this setting:

  "project_panel": {
    "folder_icons": false
  },

Which removes the folder icon and uses an arrow:

But it does not show both the folder and the arrow; currently, only one can be configured to be shown.

Is this enough to satisfy what you're looking for?

Well I wasn't expecting to have to disable folder icons to use the arrows, maybe I should update the issue to "allow folder arrows with file icons". But I assume the current available folder arrows are still technically folder icons made to look like arrows so might be worth it from a developer perspective to keep the issue as is for a real folder arrow implementation?

[Moshyfawn]

My 2 cents: add this information to #4915 and close this thread in favour of it.

[maxbrunsfeld]

I see that VS code has this by default: both arrows and icons.

I wouldn't want us to do this by default, since I think it's a bit visually noisy, but it seems reasonable to have a setting that lets you have both.