I've a lot of repositories on my local machine and previously I was using Project Manager extension, but I had some issues with it -

- It was kind of slow.

- It showed ignored repositories.

- It was not completely open source.

- There was no automated grouping for repositories.

So, I ended up creating my own that does everything above. It's still in early stage but I use it on daily basis. While it's does not have all features of project manager, It takes around 50 ms to detect all repositories inside my home directory. It is powered by a bundled rust binary that does the all the heavy lifting.

For those looking for source code -

extension - https://github.com/mohitsinghs/vscode-repo

bundled binary - https://github.com/mohitsinghs/repo

I hope it helps someone else as well.