Skills Sidebar

A lightweight VS Code / Cursor extension that discovers SKILL.md files and presents them in a sidebar tree view. Click a skill to open the chat with its slash-command pre-filled.

Skill discovery

The extension scans these directories for <dir>/*/SKILL.md:

• ${workspaceFolder}/.claude/skills/ — repo skills
• ~/.cursor/skills/ — user skills
• ~/.cursor/skills-cursor/ — user meta-skills

Each SKILL.md must have YAML frontmatter with at least a name field:

---
name: my-skill
description: Short description shown as tooltip
argument-hint: "<optional placeholder>"
---

Usage

1. Open the Skills panel in the activity bar (sparkle icon).
2. Click any skill to open the chat with /<skill-name> pre-filled.
3. Right-click a skill to open its SKILL.md file directly.
4. Use the refresh button in the panel toolbar to re-scan.

Development

npm install
npm run compile   # or: npm run watch
# Press F5 in VS Code to launch the Extension Development Host

Packaging

npm run compile
npx @vscode/vsce package --allow-missing-repository
cursor --install-extension cursor-skills-sidebar-*.vsix