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Not a VSCode user, so a genuine question: what are practical use-cases in which you want VSCode to automatically execute a task only by opening a folder?

Is it only for convenience so it already `npm i` or `npm start` without you having to do anything, or are there any other legitimate purposes beyond that?

2 comments

Apart from this feature specifically, in general people would like their IDE to run language servers, set up build systems, and any number of other things which are likely to require some configuration which allows executing some code in the folder to work. VS code has a restricted mode to prevent this, which you need to accept a dialog to disable, but it also disables most of its features.

> in general people would like their IDE to run language servers, set up build systems, and any number of other things

That I understand, I’m mainly wondering why all that would have to happen automatically by merely opening a folder.

My personal preference may differ here, but for things like running a build or starting a dev server, I usually prefer to trigger them manually, and not have them silently executed only by me browsing through the sources.

Therefore I’m trying to understand whether there are legitimate use-cases for this “auto-run on open folder” feature besides the obvious convenience aspect of saving one or two extra clicks.

When I used it, the one use case I used it was to automatically launch a Jekyll server - if I'm working on a site I'm almost certainly going to want to look at my changes in the browser. Now that I've switched I just run one extra command, it wasn't a big saving, but it was kind of nice.