In my VSCode-based note-taking infrastructure, I built the notes sidebar that shows outgoing links, backlinks, similar notes, and most recently changed notes. This note describe how it's done.

The notes sidebar has been implemented as a workspace-local extension. Usually I use VS Code Power Tools, but in order to add new views an extension is required to be able to specify contribution points.

However, most of the extension logic is offloaded to the notes server. The extension makes an axios call to the notes database server (which always runs on the notes server that I SSH into).

The sidebar generation logic actually lives in the notes server sidebar.js, outside the VS Code extension. The notes server hot-reloads this file, so whenever I make change I just run "Refresh notes sidebar" to see changes without having to "Reload window".