visual studio code - debug menu bar gear icon missing

Question

I am not seeing the small gear icon beside the play button in debug menu bar . I played around in settings and set true for all options under Debug, but still I cant see that gear button.How do I make that available in visual studio code 1.10.2

I was following some steps from here where i need to click that gear icon.

Answer 1

I had the same issue.

Firstly ensure you have a proper configuration in launch.json. Then open Debug menu and choose Start Debugging (or just press F5).

It's caused that Debug button/menu appeared.

Answer 2

VS Code can be used with single files, or with a directory as a workspace. Within the Debug view, if you only have single files, you'll only get the green "play arrow", and VS Code will try it's best to debug the file.

To get the gear icon, you'll need to open the workspace directory of the file(s) you want to debug (and this is where you want to be).

That gear icon is for editing a launch.json Launch Configuration, which you don't have one yet, so there's nothing to show (yet).

If you hit the play icon/green arrow, you'll open the Command Palette menu which will give you a selection of mostly complete launch.json templates for the language and/or toolchain you picked in the Command Palette menu.