How can I manually edit the list of recently opened files in VS Code?

Question

I rely heavily on the File: Open Recent… command to open frequently used files, but yesterday my local Google Drive folder got moved to a new location and now I can no longer access any of the files in that folder through the Open Recent panel because the paths don't match.

The fix would be as simple as replacing "/Google Drive/" with "/Google Drive/My Drive/" but I have no idea what file contains the list of files that appears in the recently opened panel.

I'm assuming it's somewhere in ~/Library/Application Support/Code but not sure where.

Answer 1

I was wondering the same thing the other day and found this while searching for a solution, so I took some time to investigate it today.
It's been a a few weeks since you posted, so hopefully this will still be of help to you.

Location of settings

Those setting are stored in the following files:

• Windows: %APPDATA%\Code\User\globalStorage\state.vscdb
• MacOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Code/User/globalStorage/state.vscdb
• Linux: ~/.config/Code/User/globalStorage/state.vscdb

If your software is cross-platform, you may want to consider using a library such as Python's platformdirs to determine the path.

The file is an sqlite3 database, which is used as a key-value store. It has a single table named ItemTable and the relevant key is history.recentlyOpenedPathsList.

The value has the following structure:

{
  "entries": [
    {
      // Only one of these two will be present, depending on whether
      // the history entry is a folder or file
      "folderUri": "path:///path/to/folder",
      "fileUri": "path:///path/to/file",
      // These properties may not exist on all entries
      "label": "...",
      "remoteAuthority": "..."
    }
  ]
}

To view the current list, you can run the following command:

sqlite3 -readonly "$VSCODE_STATE_PATH" "SELECT [value] FROM ItemTable WHERE [key] = 'history.recentlyOpenedPathsList'" | jq

Modifying the settings

Specifically, I was interested in changing the way it's displayed (the label), so I'll detail how I did that, but it should be just as easy to update the path.

Here's the Python code I used to make those edits:

import json, sqlite3, platformdirs
from typing import TypedDict, NotRequired


class VsCodeHistoryEntry(TypedDict):
    folderUri: NotRequired[str]
    fileUri: NotRequired[str]
    label: NotRequired[str]
    remoteAuthority: NotRequired[str]


vscode_state_path = (
    platformdirs.user_config_path() 
    / "Code/User/globalStorage/state.vscdb"
)

# Open the db, get the value and parse it
db = sqlite3.connect(vscode_state_path)
history_raw = db.execute("SELECT [value] FROM ItemTable WHERE  [key] = 'history.recentlyOpenedPathsList'").fetchone()[0]
history: list[VsCodeHistoryEntry] = json.loads(history_raw)["entries"]

# Make the changes you'd like
# ...

# Stringify and update
history_raw = json.dumps({"entries": history})
# ? used as placeholder to avoid accidental SQL injection
db.execute(
    "UPDATE ItemTable SET [value] = ? WHERE key = 'history.recentlyOpenedPathsList'",
    (history_raw,),
)
db.commit()
db.close()

Code references

For reference (mostly for my future self), here are the relevant source code areas:

• The settings are read here.
• The File->Open Recent uses those values as-is (see here).
• However when using the Get Started page, the Recents area is populated here. In the Get Started, the label is presented in a slightly different way:
  vscode snapshot
• The folder name is the link, and the parent folder is the the text beside it.
• This is done by the splitName method.

Notes

• Before messing around with the settings file, it would be wise to back it up.
• If a VS Code instance is running, the changes will not take effect, as VS Code will simply over-write the database on exit.
• Keep in mind that there might be some state saved by other extensions, so if anything weird happens, blame it on that.
• For reference, I'm using vscode 1.74.2 (note: editor tested and updated for v1.97.2).

Links

• SQLite command-line tools
• jq - command-line JSON processor

Answer 2

To add to Eli Finkel's answer, the location on Mac is ~/Library/Application Support/Code/User/globalStorage/state.vscdb