Less Clutter in Vscode

I am one of these kind of people that install plenty of extensions and tools and experiment around in VSCode (or any other code editor I am working with). Some time ago I realised, that this lead to a slow program and many of these plugins are only useful for a limited number of projects. So I deleted everything and restarted from scratch.

A week later I was back where I was before: Too many extensions, many of them useless for most projects. This is probably an issue every fullstack developer experiences once it gets to the details. I have projects where I need Golang support, or PHP support, or Docker support, or WordPress support, or whatever support… It fills up.

Well, after some clicking around I found an interesting new strategy to cope with “extension overflow”. While I was clicking around I found, that on the extensions screen, in any extension, we can find an “enable/disable” button. This button has a dropdown and hides a sub selection “enable/disable (Workspace)”. Yay! VSCode allows a workspace specific extension setup. Which lead me to the following “workflow” on new installations:

• install the extension
• disable the extension
• enable the extension for the workspace I require it in
• add the extension to the recommended extensions for this workspace
• save .vscode/extensions.json and workspacename.code-workspace in my repository

To add the extension to the recommended extension click the little gearwheel at the end of the function buttons and select “Add to Workspace Recommendations”. This will either create a file .vscode/extensions.json with this extension or adds the extension to the existing list of recommendations. Add this file to your repository. The next time you will initially open this repository on a new workstation a message will pop up and ask if you want to install recommended extensions.

This way I end up with exactly the functionality I need per project and still have all the plugins up-to-date and available if needed. VSCode shows what I need when I need it. Nice.

Note 1: I am not sure if that is a default setting but it seems that disabled extensions are not automatically updated anymore. This can easily be changed by using CTRL+SHIFT+P (or CMD+SHIFT+P ) to bring up the functions browser of VSCode and then searching for auto update. The function “Enable Auto Update for all extensions” will take care of the updating in the background.

Note 2: It appears that the extensions enabled per workspace are not saved somewhere in .vscode or the *.code-workspace file itself, but inside of the ~/.config/Code directory — which will lead to these extensions being not automatically in workspace-only mode when the are installed via the recommended extensions functionality. This means I will have to reinstall all recommended extension, then go through the steps above again (disable, enable per workspace) to get back to the current state. It does not appear that this will change.