Testing framework for VSCode extension development

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0700

I created a VSCode extension recently (awalsh128/vscode-keep-sorted) and learned a lot of lessons trying to set up the test environment. What I wanted was:

Tests that run against a real VSCode instance, not mocks.
An immutable test workspace, so every test starts from the same files.
A log file per test, so I can see what the extension did when a test fails.

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Some things I learned the hard way about testing extensions.

VSCode Dev on Andrew Walsh

Testing framework for VSCode extension development

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