Hello Marquee v2.0 - The VS Code Homescreen Extension Is Now Open Source • Stateful

We are excited to release a major update to the popular Marquee VS Code Extension. Most notably, we’ve decided to fully open source the repository (under the MIT License) to encourage community participation in Marquee's roadmap in the form of discussions, feedback, and code contributions through public channels on GitHub. At Stateful, we are determined to supercharge developers happiness and, with this release, open it up for everybody to build upon Marquee's foundation. Let’s take a look at what’s new in Marquee v2.0 and learn how you can get involved.

Often when a major release drops, there will be breaking changes for users, however, not with this one. We have been working tirelessly to ensure that despite major code changes and drastic improvements to performance, there's a seamless upgrade path from Marquee v1 to v2 where the overall UX remains the same. As part of this release, we’ve rewritten the JavaScript codebase in TypeScript to leverage type safety and compiler checks. On top of that, we have modularized the structure of the repository and transitioned to using Yarn Workspaces to decouple widget logic from the Marquee extension code. The goal was not only to increase performance but also to make it easier to for everybody to extend Marquee with third party widgets; built and contributed by the community. We are looking forward to see extension developers delighting Marquee users with custom widgets.

How do I do that, you might ask? Well, we didn't just stop at overhauling the extension code base, we've also put quite some love into the official extension website, adding documentation and visually upgrading the UI. We hope you like it as much as we do.

By the way, we've been taking detailed notes on all the feedback we have received and submitted through the extension / VS Code Marketplace. We'd like to thank everyone and encourage you to keep it up, especially more so now that the project is Open Source on GitHub. Here’s a bit of what’s new in the v2.0 release:

The ability to change feed channels in the Hacker News widget
A badge as notification that a widget has a filter of some sort enabled
A input field now allows to attach tags to your todos at creation time
A configuration toggle that modifies the default setting whether projects open in a new or same window
Various bug fixes that were reported, including widgets not loading remote content inside of GitHub Codespaces or Gitpod.io

We hope you enjoy all the changes we've made to the extension and we'll be looking forward to engaging with you all. Come find us either on GitHub, our community channels on Discord & Gitter, or through the in-Marquee feedback channels. We have exciting plans for Marquee. We've organized GitHub issues into a roadmap which is available for review inside the code repo.

Please do not hesitate to raise issues, start a discussion, or hit us up on Discord/Gitter. Let’s collaborate on this together!

Thanks for reading and happy coding.

The Marquee Team