ok, what seemed to solve for now is this (I have all my platformio projects in a dir that is synced among computers via dropbox). I am used to open the containing folder as a workspace, as it worked on my old laptop. Like this.
WORKSPACE_FOLDER\PlatformIO_proj1
WORKSPACE_FOLDER\PlatformIO_proj2
...
and so on. so opening WORKSPACE_FOLDER as either a workspace or a folder works on old laptop but not on new one.
This does not work on new laptop. Both laptops are running same sw version of everything, but there must have been something that made the difference. Maybe because in the old laptop i “grew” my project dir and workspace one at a time?
anyway, by doing what was suggested here, I managed to get platformio to work for now.
- open just one of the projects as a folder e.g. WORKSPACE_FOLDER\PlatformIO_prj1. PlatformIO commands should be available now.
- add all other project folders inside WORKSPACE_FOLDER as extra folders. so far, if I try to include WORKSPACE_FOLDER itself, PlatformIO will stop working again.
Hope this helps in troubleshooting / making a future better user experience