How to prevent commands from being displayed if the extension is not active? - visual-studio-code

Question

I am writing an extension and I'm providing a custom command, declare in the package.json as:
{
"contributes": {
"commands": [
{
"command": "myext.doSomething",
"title": "Do something"
}
]
}
}
I'm am then registering it in the extension, when it activates:
commands.registerCommand("myext.doSomething", () => console.log("hi"))
This works, but the Do Something command is present in the command palette even if the extension is not active.
This means that if the user selects the command when the extension is not active, an error along the lines of
command myext.doSomething not found
Is there a way to prevent custom commands to be displayed in the command palette unless the extension has been activated?

Answer 1

Instead of not showing your command when the extension is not active, you can just add it to the activationEvents like this in your package.json. In your case:
{
"activationEvents": [
"onCommand:myext.doSomething"
]
}
This will run the exported activate function of your extension before the command is invoked.
Also the when keyword could be an option for you. I answered a similar question on that topic here.
Edit:
You can control a command's visibility in the command pallette by additionally contributing a contextual menu (docs). Then you can for instance only display the command when the editor's file has a specific language id.
Example:
{
"menus": {
"commandPalette": [
{
"command": "myext.doSomething",
"when": "editorLangId==scala"
}
]
}
}