microsoft / microsoft/vscode-remote-release

Project names in DevContainer environment become unusable; lets make it

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#11,508 0 comments 1 reaction 1 assignee View on GitHub

@chrmarti is already working on this.

Since Mar 1, 2026.

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Description

When I open a project in DevContainer the project name becomes really unusable. It starts with "WORKSPACE" (which is again wrong, because VSCode has workspaces feature, which nothing to do with containers; this is misleading in addition), then goes "DEV CONTAINER", and only then goes devcontainer name taken from .devcontainer.json.

So. In the end, if I open multiply windows, then they all look like this:

Image

I mean left side panel is not representative. All projects are "WORKSPACES" now. Even if I have only one window open its a bit hard to understand. Well, you can argue, that there is a window bar, that have devcontainer name... but honestly saying its also starts with "workspace [Dev Container: ...." which is still hard to read, because all windows start with these words)

So, my proposal is to make it more clean look:

  1. Reverse order: "projectname [DevContainer]"
  2. Do not use "WORKSPACE", when its not workspace. I heavily using workspaces, and believe me this is missleading. I do not understand when workspace is open, or this is just DevContainer;
  3. And will be cool to prefix "projectname [DevContainer]" with DevContainer icon. This will make it short and immediatelly understand it is DevContainer environment.

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