Hey everyone, I've been wrestling with a persistent and quite noisy issue in my VS Code setup for the past few weeks, and after some extensive trial and error, I've managed to narrow down the conflict to a specific trio of extensions. I'm hoping someone here has encountered this or has ideas for a more elegant workaround than my current band-aid.
The core symptom is that VS Code gets stuck in a loop of displaying "Reindexing..." or "Indexing..." notifications almost constantly, which makes the editor feel sluggish and the status bar flickers incessantly. This happens specifically when I have the following extensions all enabled:
* **OpenClaw** (for managing GitHub repositories)
* **Docker** (by Microsoft)
* **Dev Containers** (by Microsoft)
Individually, or with any two of them, everything runs fine. But the moment all three are active together, the reindexing loop begins. It seems like they're tripping over each other trying to index or watch the same files, particularly within Docker and project contexts. My environment is VS Code Insiders on macOS Ventura, but I've reproduced it on a Windows 11 machine as well.
Here's what I've tried so far:
* **Clearing caches:** I've deleted the `~/.vscode` cache folders and `%APPDATA%Code` caches, which provides a temporary respite (maybe 10 minutes) before the loop resumes.
* **Disabling file watchers:** I added the following to my `settings.json`, which reduced the frequency but didn't stop it.
```json
"files.watcherExclude": {
"**/.git/objects/**": true,
"**/.git/subtree-cache/**": true,
"**/node_modules/*/**": true,
"**/vendor/**": true,
"**/target/**": true
}
```
* **The only functional workaround:** I've had to resort to manually disabling the **Docker** extension whenever I'm not actively working with Dockerfiles or containers. Then, I re-enable it when needed. This is far from ideal.
My current theory is that both OpenClaw and the Dev Containers extension are aggressively watching for changes in the `.git` folder or project structure, and the Docker extension's own file watching mechanisms are creating a conflict that triggers a re-index. Has anyone else seen this pattern? Is there a more precise setting or exclusion we could add to one of these extensions to make them play nice?
I'd be happy to collect logs or run specific diagnostics if the community has suggestions. I really prefer to keep all three extensions active for my workflow.
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