Notification usage guidelines

[isidorn]

I think we should:

• Revisit all internal usages of notifications and consider if they should be converted to modal dialogs if they require immediate user actions
• Once we figure out the best thing to do in VS Code core we should update our extension guidelines so extension can follow the patterns that we do in core

Ideally this exercise would move "important" to be modal dialogs, and thus we can start exercising a more aggressive hide strategy towards regular notifications.

fyi @devinvalenciano @meganrogge

[Tyriar]

The terminal workspace permissions dialogs should be modals imo, but that might get fixed when we adopt trusted workspaces #119344

[isidorn]

@misolori is working on a nice flow chart to make it easy to distinguish if a usage should use a modal dialog or a notification.
Until he has that, here are some rules of thumb which I think can be helpful:

• User interaction immediately needed -> modal
• Feature can not continue without input -> modal
• Not directly user initiated -> notification

Also I am not aware that we have any modal dialogs that should instead be notifications.
So for this exercise I plan to simply go through the usages of prompt api. I will list any questionable usages here.

[isidorn]

Notifications which might no longer be needed:

• FindWidget @rebornix
• Close Workspace action @sandy081 I think this action should be disabled when there is no workspace, so ideally this notification is not needed
• Settings are automatically saved @sandy081 I think we have educated our users enough and I think the future is that setting do not have to be Applied. So I would think about removing this notification alltogether
• Tests shuold this be an .error or at least a warn @connor4312
• License @joaomoreno I think we can just remove this
• Welcome @chrmarti this feels like it should use the progress api? And not notifications
• Sync Sync turned on. @sandy081 do we really need to notify the user that sync is on, doesn't the activity bar badge update accordingly? Actually in this file there are a lot of notifications usages. If you think @sandy081 all of them make good sense feel free to check this off.
• Extensions Install @sandy081 should this action be disabled if there are no workspace extension recommendations?

I have removed some notifications in debug and file land already and changed some from info to warn in undoRedoService.

[isidorn]

Here's a list of questionable Notifications which are used for user prompts:

• MenuBar @sbatten we might be able to remove this since now the custom menu is on by default, correct?
• LargeFileOptimisation @alexdima the flow here is -> we show notification with actions -> user chooses one -> we show another notification asking the user to reload the file. Could we improve this flow to just have one prompt notification which would just update the setting and automatically reload the file
• Workspace recommendation prompt captured here "Do you want to install the recommend extensions for this repository" should not show up on startup #121802
• Malicious Extension Uninstalled @sandy081 why would a user want to reload? If it is required for security we should use a modal dialog, if not then we should probably just use a status message to notify the user
• All extensions disabled @sandy081 I think all extensions are disabled due to user action and then we still show this notification on startup. Does it makes sense to instead show a badge on the Extensions viewlet?
• Formatter @jrieken The first .prompt should actually be a warn and the second one might deserve to be a modal dialog since it is a user triggered action which can not proceed.
• Installation corrupt @alexdima I believe this should be changed to be a modal dialog, and to not allow to not show again. Since we do not really want the user to continue using VS Code in this state
• Tasks @alexr00 I know you are removing old version of tasks, since you are revisiting that can you maybe review the usage of .prompt in tasks. If it is user blocking it should be a modal dialog, if we can get rid of it even better. This one looks like we can remove it once we have workspace trust
• Localization @dbaeumer after a user has installed an extension we show a notification asking if he would like to apply and reload, since this is user initiated it might make sense to use a modal dialog. What do you think?
• Trusted Domains @JacksonKearl so here we open the trusted domains editor and show a notification. Can we just have the explanation in the trusted domains editor and not show the notification at all?
• Update @joaomoreno can we just use a progress service here for the prompt that it is in progress? That way might be a bit less obtrusive