Rust Cargo External Libraries

A small VSCode extension that adds a Rust External Libraries tree to the Explorer panel.

It is designed for Rust projects, including Remote-WSL workspaces.

Features

• Runs cargo metadata --format-version=1.
• Shows all Cargo packages where source != null.
• Groups dependencies by registry, git, and path.
• Expands dependency source directories directly from Cargo's real cache/checkouts.
• Opens files by clicking in the tree.
• Refreshes when Cargo.toml or Cargo.lock changes.
• Shows rust-std when rust-src is installed.
• Supports Ctrl+Click / F12 from dependency names in Cargo.toml to dependency source.

Requirements

Inside the VSCode extension host environment, these commands must be available:

cargo --version
rustc --version

For standard library source:

rustup component add rust-src

For WSL projects, install/run this extension in the WSL extension host.

Usage

Open a Rust workspace containing Cargo.toml. In Explorer, open:

Rust External Libraries

Then expand:

registry
  tokio 1.x.x
    src
      lib.rs

In Cargo.toml, use Ctrl+Click or F12 on dependency names such as:

[dependencies]
tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] }
bytes = "1"

The extension prefers src/lib.rs when available; otherwise it opens the dependency Cargo.toml.

Notes

This extension does not modify your project and does not create symlinks. It only reads Cargo metadata and opens files from Cargo's dependency cache.

Configuration

{
  "rustExternalLibraries.includeHiddenFiles": false,
  "rustExternalLibraries.includeTargetDir": false,
  "rustExternalLibraries.maxDirectoryEntries": 500,
  "rustExternalLibraries.preferLibRsForCargoTomlDefinition": true
}