Improvements to Node Auto Attach to improve defaults and discoverability

[auchenberg]

We should improve Node auto attach in the following ways:

1. Remove the Toggle Auto Attach status bar action, and replace it with the user setting instead. It's my understanding that the StatusBarAction was added due to a performance concern on Windows, which have been resolved.

The rationale is to make it a global setting, and declutter the already full statusbar. This would also enable a workspace setting to override for a specific project, and enable users to toggle this once.

2. We should enable Auto attach by default, and provide more guidance to the user to on what's going on. For example, show a notification when a debug command line is detected in the terminal, that has an explainer text, and an action to disable.

The overall rationale is to improve discoverability and provide a more opinionated default.

cc @egamma, @weinand

[weinand]

@auchenberg

• the performance concern on Windows hasn't been solved (because the Auto-Attach features lives in an extension and we cannot use Daniel's process-tree module because it uses native code).
• I agree that using a setting for this feature is the right approach. But that would require that the node-debug extensions are activated on startup (which is a bit strange for users that are not using node.js). We could solve this issue if there were an activation event that fires on a specific user/workspace setting. Without such event the only workaround I can think of is to move auto-attach into another built-in extension...

[weinand]

I will create a new built-in extension to address the settings issue.

[weinand]

The auto-attach is now a setting which makes it survive restarts.

I will not enable it by default for these reasons:

• polling for all processes is still slow on windows and we cannot use the optimised 'process tree' module because it uses native code,
• continuous polling is a waste of resources if a user has no interest in node.js,
• currently we cannot differentiate whether node was launched in the integrated terminal because the user typed a command or whether a launch config started node.

[auchenberg]

@weinand What will happen in case 3) today if you have auto-attach enabled?

[weinand]

@auchenberg if you are using F5 on a launch configuration configured for the integrated terminal, you will get this dialog after 10 secs: