Code change:
<!-- Do Not Delete This! featurerequesttemplate --<!-- Please read our Rules of Conduct: --<!-- Please search existing issues to avoid creating duplicates. --<!-- Describe the feature you'd like. --The comments API doesn't have the concept of resolved/unresolved threads, although most code review tools distinguish them. The current API allows us to surface this to the users, see However, this seems pretty limited. I find it difficult to identify all my unresolved comments. It's very easy to miss some of them. If the API had a boolean for unresolved comments, we could surface them in multiple ways: In the Comments panel, surface the number of unresolved comments, similar to what is done with Problems: ! In the Comments panel, highlight the unresolved comments (or put them in bold), so that it's obvious to the user what comments they still have to go through. In the Comments panel, have a way to hide/filter the resolved comments. In the Editor, consider consider using a different background color for unresolved comments. I currently use a different label for unresolved comments, but this is very subtle. In the gutter, use a different symbol for unresolved comments (e.g. or a diamond of another color). In the Editor, provide a way to go to the next unresolved comment (an alternative to ).
Let's discuss the API change. IMO, the information should be part of a . On many levels, Comments seem similar to s. A diagnostic is a comment provided by a tool such as a compiler. A comment is typically provided by a human. Diagnostics have a severity field, which indicates how important is the problem. We need an equivalent for Comments, something that tells the user if an action is expected (e.g. they need to resolve it) or not. Once the user addresses the comment, the importance is reduced. simplistic solution is to add a boolean, e.g. . to , we can go for a two-state enum instead: to be more general: . We might consider having more fields here. In a code review, multiple users interact with the comments. The current VSCode user is not necessarily the person who needs to do something. For example, the user has just updated the comment and they wait for a response. So the third value could be used to mean "it's not my turn" or "acknowledged, I'll come back later". The benefit is that the user can use the list of "unresolved" issues as a TODO-list and publish the comments once it's empty.
Thank you very much for your proposal. and me have quickly discussed this and we believe this proposal makes good sense. We plan to start looking into it next milestone. Though no promises yet when this will land, we will know more in December when we start our investigation.
All of the proposals in have merit. In a perfect world I would choose one of options 2 or 4; however, we have users of the comments API who's comments don't have a resolved/unresolved state. Option 3 circumvents that, but then we have the issue of what to show in the UI: a GitHub PR comment isn't high or low priority. Another proposal, similar to how comment reactions work:
I see than left comments on the commit (). I like the approach of having an object for the state (instead of the proposed boolean/enum), it gives more flexibility and lets user create their own states. In my proposal, the information was attached to a thread, not to a single comment. Do we have use-cases where we want this information per comment? We might also want to control the gutter icon:
GitHub comments are resolved per-thread, so no, no cases were we want it per comment. I'll move it to the thread.
After much discussion, we have decided to proceed with the following: The main reasoning behind this is that resolved vs. unresolved comments should look the same to the user across a GitHub PR extension, an Azure Dev Ops PR extensions, and any other PR extension. There original concern around using "resolved" and "unresolved" is that maybe not all comment provider have those states (maybe they have "viewed" and "unviewed" states for example). To alleviate this, we'll see if we can avoid using "resolved"/"unresolved" language in the UI. If additional states are needed later, we can always add more to the API.
I have a basic implementation of this working, with and themable colors. Before I finish up the pull request to send it out, I was wondering what the best practice is for providing defaults for these colors? In the mocks from we use a yellow for unresolved comments that is inspired by visuals of our internal tool. I am not sure if they match an established VS Code palette.
awesome, looking forward to reviewing it! Generally, we try to avoid introducing a new color entirely for something like this. The best practice would be to look through the existing color values where we use yellow then use the same yellow, just like is done here where uses the same color as : We'll also do a UX review of this, so the color may end up changing anyway.
I went for new colors as the comments are conceptually something different than e.g. editor warnings. Currently the comments in the editor use (default blue), so a theme, an extension, or the users themselves would not be able to style comments independently of peek views. I think it makes sense to base the default on another color like as in your example, so that themes which omit the new colors receive a reasonable default, but it seems like we would give up a lot of flexibility and also clarity if comment widget colors directly used something like internally?
Yes, basing the color on another is what I meant! I agree that we don't want to directly use another theme color.
If anyone is eager for this API to be finalized then please comment and let me know how it's working for you. Otherwise, I will plan to finalize later in 2022.
This would be very nice to have. We are using Github and especially larger PRs are hard to manage, if there are many comments (in Github as well as in VSCode)
So is there currently a way to filter resolved/unresolved comments in the sidebar? If not what can I modify currently to provide a visual distinction between resolved/unresolved?
there's a color difference on the icon, but that's currently it. This is the feature request you're looking for

Related discussion:
text: <del> /*--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *  Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. *  Licensed under the MIT License. See License.txt in the project root for license information. *--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------*/ declare module 'vscode' { // https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/127473 /** * The state of a comment thread. */ export enum CommentThreadState { Unresolved = 0, Resolved = 1 } export interface CommentThread { /** * The optional state of a comment thread, which may affect how the comment is displayed. */ state?: CommentThreadState; } } </del>