Add agent metadata statusbar to monitor resource usage

[EhabY]

#191

Looks like the following:

The statusbar creation happens in remote.ts#setup which AFAIK seems to be called only once per session/extension activation. The creation of this statusbar happens at the very end when everything goes smoothly.

[code-asher]

Awesome! Left some minor thoughts. We should add a changelog entry as well, and it might make sense to mention that if they want to change which shows in the toolbar, they can reorder the metadata in the Terraform since we show the first one.

[code-asher]

Would it make sense to show the error here? Or just a warning icon or something with the error in the tooltip maybe?

[EhabY]

Hmmm tbh I am not entirely sure how frequent an error like this can happen.

If we show an error, it could be annoying if it keeps popping up frequently. Perhaps adding an error icon with some label and the tooltip can include the error message is good (while still logging of course). Though I don't love having a "useless" status bar item since the status bar is already crowded 🤔

Which is why I favor the current approach, what do you think?

[code-asher]

My thinking is that if we think it is important enough to show metadata in the status bar, it is important enough to show errors getting that metadata.

Definitely agree there should be no popups or anything like that, that would be super annoying.

Thinking about it from the original request, the user wanted to be able to see disk space in the status bar. Suppose one day there was an error and we could not fetch the metadata, likely the user wants to be aware of that (I am projecting of course lol)

[EhabY]

Hmmm yeah I see your point now. In that case, I think I can show the something like a warning logo with a label then when hovering we show the error details (the same one that is logged). We can even change the background color so it's yellow-ish for example.

So my proposal is something like

statusBarItem.text = "$(warning) Agent Status Unavailable";
statusBarItem.tooltip = errMessage;
statusBarItem.color = new vscode.ThemeColor(
	"statusBarItem.warningForeground",
);
statusBarItem.backgroundColor = new vscode.ThemeColor(
	"statusBarItem.warningBackground",
);

[code-asher]

I like it!

[EhabY]

Ah I almost forgot, we still hide the status bar if there is no metadata. Do we want that still?

[code-asher]

Oh good point hmmm...I wonder if it would make sense to show "no metadata" and in the popup explain that if you want metadata you have to add it to your workspace template?

But on the other hand, maybe if the template has no metadata it is because the user explicitly did not want to see metadata, and this could be annoying to them.

Honestly not sure, maybe the best move is to add a toggle to hide/disable the metadata?

[EhabY]

You mean always show the status bar item, and if there are no data then we simply say "No metadata available" and the user can toggle the status bar item in a setting 🤔 ?

Yeah not sure as well... For reference, in the tree view, if there is no metadata then nothing is shown to the user about that

[code-asher]

Yup that was what I was thinking.

I think for now we just hide it, like you say we hide it in the sidebar as well. It could be nice to show a message for discoverability reasons; users may not even realize they can have metadata to show. But, I think it would make sense to revisit that together with the sidebar at a later point.

[EhabY]

One extra improvement here is that we can use Coders icon right next to the text. This would require creating a custom font with all the extensions logos in it so might be out of scope here 🤔

For example the Git extension adds this which gives context to what the text after it means:

--

Currently in this PR, it just shows whatever the first item is which is not intuitive for users to recognize as being related to Coder

[EhabY]

This is just using the logo SVG:

It seems a bit big tbh, maybe the C alone or the dash can be smaller?

[matifali]

I prefer the no logo, or if we can make the logo smaller, such as 70% of its original size.

[EhabY]

I prefer the no logo, or if we can make the logo smaller, such as 70% of its original size.

Agreed, the logo is a bit too big, here's how it looks if the logo is scaled down to 60% of its original size:

---

Ideally there should be a more "square" form of the Coder logo that would fit the VS Code environment more. Here it just means that the logo is made smaller and so there are invisible spaces around it. For example, if you point to the left of it you get the hover due to the invisible padding:

[matifali]

@rachelmullenax can we have a square logo for use cases like this?

[code-asher]

I wonder if some generic icon indicating a remote resource would work better than the logo? Like a cloud icon or something.

[EhabY]

I wonder if some generic icon indicating a remote resource would work better than the logo? Like a cloud icon or something.

I think this could work well since the VS Code codions fit well within the ecosystem.

The only worry here is that just having an icon won't give enough of an indication that this is Coder's stats but could be fine since other extensions use those so it's consistent 🤔

[code-asher]

The only worry here is that just having an icon won't give enough of an indication that this is Coder's stats but could be fine since other extensions use those so it's consistent

True! But yeah I like the idea of consistent-looking icons in the status bar. I think mostly the logo being so thick and bold compared to the other icons is what throws me off. But I will defer to what you and @matifali think.

[matifali]

Let's keep using the Coder logo. We can update when @rachelmullenax gets back.

[EhabY]

Alright, I'll keep the 70% one but I did have to write a fantasticon script to generate the font from the logo. Should I push everything there and possibly make it part of the script? Or just push the font that contains the logo?. (There is no way to use custom logos in the statusbar without adding a custom font...)

The former will make sure we can easily add more icons but requires some discussion since it should be added to the build workflow, while the latter is just a single woff2 file that contains the scaled down logo 🤔

Alternatively, we can just use one of the default VS Code logos above (for now)

[matifali]

Alternatively, we can just use one of the default VS Code logos above (for now)

I am not familiar with the complexities of custom fonts, so let's use the Dashboard logo, specifically the round gauge.

[EhabY]

Alternatively, we can just use one of the default VS Code logos above (for now)

I am not familiar with the complexities of custom fonts, so let's use the Dashboard logo, specifically the round gauge.

Alright, will do, adding a custom font is not difficult but requires some thought and makes sense to do after we have the logo

[EhabY]

This is how it looks like when it is failing (but with an error message):

When it works it looks like this:

If there are no errors but the metadata is empty, then we simply hide the status bar item.

[code-asher]

Looks awesome thank you!

[matifali]

If there is a template with no metadata block in coder_agent, how do we handle it? Do we hide it completely or show an error? If it's the latter, then we should probably look into hiding it from the status bar.

[EhabY]

If there is a template with no metadata block in coder_agent, how do we handle it? Do we hide it completely or show an error? If it's the latter, then we should probably look into hiding it from the status bar.

Currently if the metadata is undefined (or an empty list), then nothing is shown in the tree view nor the status bar item. See this thread: #555 (comment)