Visual Studio Code – Is there a way to organize folders and files manually in VS Code's Explorer view?

At the time of this writing, for vanilla VS Code, all you have is explorer.sortOrder, which has the options: default, filesFirst, foldersNestFiles, mixed, modified, and type. Not what you’re looking for.

See Explorer / Opened Editors Sorting #27286, which tracks feature requests related to Explorer sorting. Custom Sort Order in File Explorer #119207 was closed in favour of it, and it contains as open items, Feature Request: api to custom files sort order at the sidebar #12345 and Choose a sort order of directories and files according to the settings pattern #23231 among others.

Also historically related and which probably should have been closed in favour of #27286 (if it had existed back then): Manually change the order of the folders and files that are listed in VSCode Explorer
#91843 and Manually change the order of the folders and files that are listed in VSCode File Explorer
#95239.

As for extensions, see @Brebber’s answer to How can I manually change the order that folders are listed in Visual Studio Code Explorer?, which lists the following extensions which you might have luck with:

• kdcro101.favorites
• oleg-shilo.favorites
• sabitovvt.favorites-panel
• howardzuo.vscode-favorites

For your reference / learning purposes, I found @Brebber‘s answer by googling "vscode extension manually sort explorer", and the GitHub issue tickets by googling "github vscode issues manually sort explorer".

Fun fact: #119207 was opened by one of the Stack Overflow staff, @KyleMit.