Taskbench

A workbench for project tasks. Create, run and manage shell commands from the Explorer sidebar without leaving your editor.

Features

• One-click runs — save a command once, run it any time from the sidebar
• Live status — running tasks show a pulsing indicator and can be stopped in place
• Background tasks — mark long-running servers and watchers so VS Code treats them accordingly
• Filtering — narrow the list instantly when a project accumulates tasks
• Plain JSON storage — tasks live in .tasks/task.json in your workspace, using the standard VS Code task schema, so they can be committed and shared with your team

Usage

1. Open the Taskbench view in the Explorer sidebar.
2. Click the + button (or run Taskbench: New Task) and give the task a label and a command.
3. Press the play button to run it. Running tasks can be stopped with the stop button, or by double-clicking the row.

Tasks execute through the built-in VS Code task system, so output appears in the regular terminal panel.

Task file

Tasks are stored in .tasks/task.json at the workspace root:

{
   "version": "2.0.0",
   "tasks": [
      {
         "label": "build",
         "type": "shell",
         "command": "npm run build",
         "options": {
            "cwd": "${workspaceFolder}"
         }
      }
   ]
}

Edit the file directly with Taskbench: Open task.json — the view picks up changes automatically.

Commands

Requirements

VS Code 1.75 or later. No other dependencies.

Release Notes

See CHANGELOG.md.