Copy enable/disable extensions settings to another workspace

Question

Idea:

I wanted to clean up my vscode extensions, because I'm working with a lot of different languages/file types and having all these extensions installed and enabled at once is just too much.

Problem:

I disabled some extensions for a specific workspace, and wanted to copy these settings to another workspace, but vscode is not storing the information about enabled/disabled extensions in .vscode/settings.json.

Questions:

1. Is there any way to copy these settings from one workspace to another?
2. Is there a better way of dealing with lots of extensions?
3. Can you recommend tools/extensions for managing extensions per workspace or language(s)

I assume vscode is not loading all extensions at once, but rather when needed. But some extensions display icons on the left or bottom of the window and overcrowd the "Show All Commands" list/search.

Answer 1

VS Code stores this info in its internals instead of the .vscode folder, so you can't copy this info between workspaces. There is an open issue asking exactly what you want.

But, you have an alternative. Use the Profile Switcher extension.

Its description:

This extension allows you to define a number of settings profiles that you can easily switch between. The original idea for this extension came from my desire to have an easy way for me to switch my VS Code to a setup that was better optimised for presenting (changed themes, increase font size, etc).

And this is how it handles extensions:

A profile isn't just the settings you have enabled, but also the extensions that were installed. This allows you to create different profiles for different styles of development (e.g. a React profile and a Vue profile, loading their respective extensions only).

Hope this helps

Answer 2

There is a github issue for this problem: Feature Request: Enable/disable extensions from config file #40239.

I posted there a workaround using multiple vscode instances: link

Here is a copy-paste:

---

I use some kind of workaround to be able to use the extensions I want.

According to the vscode-cli your can specify the folders for extensions and user-data:

Options                  Description

--extensions-dir <dir>   Set the root path for extensions.
--user-data-dir <dir>    Specifies the directory that user data is kept in. Can be used to open multiple distinct instances of Code.

Basically, I create a specific folder for my specific tasks (one of front, one for back, ..) and set basic extensions to my default vscode.

To launch my custom config:

code --extensions-dir "$HOME/.vscode/profiles/my-super-profile/extensions" --user-data-dir "$HOME/.vscode/profiles/my-super-profile/data"

The problem are that:

• It's not REALLY a project config file but a global preference file
• I had to install manually the extensions. I believe there is a hackish way to do this
• It use more size than necessary (multiple vscode data / duplicate extensions)
• It doesn't solve in a clean way the team-sharing problem