Hey, does your VS Code setup feel heavy? Lighten it
up! With the brand new Profiles feature in Visual Studio
Code, you can get a fresh, configurable VS Code environment
in seconds. Let's check it out. All right, so this
is my VS Code and you can see I've got
a lot of extensions installed. The icons actually overflow my
activity bar here. There's just quite a bit going on.
So we can get a fresh setup for VS Code
by going to Profiles.
Now, everybody gets the default profile by... default, but we can
create a new one by going to Create Profile. When
we do this we have the option to create an
empty profile or use the current profile, which is my
current setup to make a new one. So let's choose
empty and we're just going to call this web dev.
Now when we create this, you'll notice that we get
VS Code as it comes out-of-the-box right? So it's like
a full reset without having to uninstall anything. There's no
extensions installed. If we go to install 0 extensions installed,
my sidebar is back on the left, my zoom is
back, the theme is back to what it was. So
let's customize this a bit. Let's add the prettier extension
we're going to need that it's a must have for
web dev.
And live preview. It's also a very good one to
use for webdev, so let's add that one as well.
And then let's get a new theme here. So let's
look in categories and let's get the fairy floss theme,
which is a nice purple theme and we'll set that.
OK, so this is now our webdev profile, and we
know this because it says webdev down here. And then
up here in the top we also see it in
the title bar. So where is my default setup?
Well, it's still there. If we come back to profiles,
go to Webdev, let's go back to default, and my
default setup is instantly restored. All of my extensions are
back. It's kind of magical. Now we can, as we
said, create a new profile, or we can extend an
existing one. So for instance, if we wanted to extend
the Webdev profile, let's do that. We'll say create a
profile, let's use the current profile, which is Webdev, and
we'll call this Webdev Extended.
And then we have the option to bring in things
that we want. So maybe we want to bring in
Live Preview and Fairy Floss, but not Prettier. So we'll
deselect that and create the profile. And then you can
see if we go to extensions, we only have one
installed, we have the theme, and then we have Live
preview, but we don't have Prettier. OK, so we can
extend existing profiles just like this.
You can extend to profiles that you create and you
can also extend to profiles that we've created for you
that we think you might like. So for instance, we've
added some for Python, Angular, Data Science, Doc Writer - which
would be like markdown, Java, Node. So let's do the
Python one. And you can see that before we actually
create this this profile based on the settings that we've
provided for you, we have an option to customize this.
So maybe we don't want this one and we don't
want this one.
Everything else looks fine. Let's create the profile, and here's
our new Python profile that was just created. But perhaps
we want to rename this so we can to. Let's
just call this a Super Python Setup. There we go.
And again, it's in the title bar so we know
where we are. And as usual, we can go back
to the default profile at anytime. Now, profiles are designed
to be shared, so let's say that we wanted to
share our web dev profile. We think it looks really
nice.
Everybody should have a configuration this nice. So let's go
here to profiles and then export. And we have two
options here. So first of all, we can pick what
we want to export. We're going to export the whole
profile, but do we want to export to a local
file or do we could have Gist? So we're going
to select a Gist because that's something that we can
actually share. And let's go ahead and say open link.
So when we open that link, it opens in vscode.dev
and we have a chance to customize it
before we even load it in Visual Studio Code. Kind
of like a preview. So let's create the profile in
VS Code. It'll click open and we're creating our web
dev profile and we can just say create. It's already
there. So let's create a new web dev profile and
it's WebDev MOAR. There we go.
And that is our profile. Now what's nice about this
is we can take this URL and we can just
share it with the world. And as long as the
URL to the profile is public, people will be able
to import and see the setup that we have. So
that's the new profiles in Visual Studio Code giving you
a clean setup that you can customize and share with
your friends. And by the way, if you're into sharing,
share your VS Code setup in the comments below. We'd
love to see how you customize Visual Studio Code. Happy
coding.
I'm a.