Limit Rainbow CSV loading to custom file extensions

[mdnava]

Please consider adding support to limit loading of this plugin to custom file extensions (by default: csv, tab, tsv.. etc..).. This in order to remove unnecessary load time. It tends to add up, and I barely use csv files with different file extensions.

Edit 2023-09-17 20:09

I noticed I can remove "Autodetect_separators" and loading time goes down,.

I still think it would be a good feature to keep the "Autodetect_separators" and be able to limit loading by file extension. Any way it goes is okay. I think it worth to mention.

Best regards..

[mechatroner]

Thanks for opening this issue, it could serve as a good reference for tracking potential loading performance problems. So far the best loading performance tracking tool I have found is Ctrl + P + Developer: Startup Performance command. The first time I ran it "rainbow-csv" was among the slowest extensions with 120 ms loading time, but then I reopened VSCode and it actually became one of the fastest (see the table below). So it looks like the loading time is not very consistent and can change from start-up to start-up.

In rainbow-csv I tried to minimize the amount of code the extension needs for the most basic functions and lazy-load the more advanced stuff. Also, the table shows that the activation function takes a lot of time to finish, but I guess it is not such a big deal since the function is async (actually it has await sleep(1000) in it as a hacky workaround for some VSCode behavior, so it explains >1 sec activation time).

I am not sure if it is possible to limit the activation of a particular extension through the user config, but I will check. Also, I see no reason why removing "Autodetect_separators" would affect loading time (although I might be missing something) so most likely this is just the overall noisiness of this metric

Extension Activation Stats

Extension	Eager	Load Code	Call Activate	Finish Activate	Event	By
vscode.git	true	34	17	124	*	vscode.git
vscode.git-base	true	8	0	0	*	vscode.git
vscode.github	true	20	1	3	*	vscode.github
vscode.npm	true	14	5	439	workspaceContains:package.json	vscode.npm
vscode.debug-auto-launch	false	6	1	0	onStartupFinished	vscode.debug-auto-launch
vscode.emmet	false	11	8	0	onLanguage	vscode.emmet
vscode.extension-editing	false	10	1	0	onLanguage:markdown	vscode.extension-editing
vscode.github-authentication	false	21	1	2	onAuthenticationRequest:github	vscode.github-authentication
vscode.markdown-language-features	false	53	7	302	onLanguage:markdown	vscode.markdown-language-features
vscode.markdown-math	false	13	0	0	api	vscode.markdown-language-features
vscode.merge-conflict	false	13	4	3	onStartupFinished	vscode.merge-conflict
vscode.microsoft-authentication	false	26	1	12	onAuthenticationRequest:microsoft	vscode.microsoft-authentication
ms-vscode-remote.remote-wsl-recommender	false	19	16	2	onStartupFinished	ms-vscode-remote.remote-wsl-recommender
mechatroner.rainbow-csv	false	11	3	1016	onLanguage:csv	mechatroner.rainbow-csv
ms-vscode.remote-server	false	43	19	0	onStartupFinished	ms-vscode.remote-server

[mechatroner]

I did some googling and apparently this functionality is not supported in VSCode - the feature request was closed: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/83783

[mdnava]

I did some googling and apparently this functionality is not supported in VSCode - the feature request was closed: microsoft/vscode#83783

Edited 2023-09-22 03:12

@mechatroner Does this means all VS Code extensions are activated all the time?. I would assume only extensions currently showing up the loading time are active in VS Code (when first opened). And as far as I can recall these exts usually match assigned filetypes.

For instance, opening a Python script:

Opening any other filetype:

It seems the Python extension is only loaded when Python scripts are opened. I might be wrong. At this time I don't actually know the inner workings of VS Code.

[mechatroner]

Right, very often extensions define a set of file types that should trigger the activation event, the problem is that it is not possible to override these rules from the user config.

[mdnava]

@mechatroner

Right, very often extensions define a set of file types that should trigger the activation event, the problem is that it is not possible to override these rules from the user config.

Well, I do implement something like this, that works:

    "files.associations": {
        "*.ahk":    "ahk",
        "*.ahk2":   "ahk2",
        "*.jsx":    "javascript",
        "*.py2":    "python",
        "*.task":   "xml"
    },

Language extensions are loaded properly for each option set here.

I don't know if the extension developer has access to allow this customization, but I would assume.