codefoster

I finally realized why I wasn’t investing a lot of thought or time on my Visual Studio Code snippet library. It’s transient.

I looked up where the user settings are being saved - C:\users\<me>\AppData\Roaming\Code\User.

Well, that’s a bit of a crock. It’s 2016. I want everything saved to my OneDrive folder so I can do a reload without considering the various settings files I’ll have to back up and restore. What, am I a caveman?

I searched VS Code and my registry and didn’t see an obvious (I only have about 2.5 minutes to spend on tasks like this) way to customize the path, so I did what any developer in this modern era would do. I posted a question on StackOverflow.

And in true SO form, I got an answer back very quickly. Well, it wasn’t exactly an answer, but close. DAXaholic responded that there is an extension for VS Code that may fit the bill.

It’s called Visual Studio Code Settings Sync by Shan Khan. You can install it in Visual Studio Code by going to your command palette (CTRL+P) and typing ext install code-settings-sync.

Now, I had to spend a few synapses on this strategy for saving settings. The way Shan set this up it saves your settings, snippets, launch, and keybindings to your GitHub account as gists. Creative, Shan. It’s not exactly the same as having my settings and snippets saved to my OneDrive, but I kinda like it. I do have to manually upload everything, and by manual I only mean that I have to execute the Sync: Update/Upload Settings command in Code. And then when I reload or slide over to a new work machine I have to Sync: Download Settings.

I sort of like, however, storing bits of code in my GitHub Gists repository.

One advantage is that I could easily share my settings with the world. By default, the extension creates the gist as secret. I don’t like secrets though, so I can just edit that gist on gist.github.com and hit the Make Public button.

And now I can share the link with you. Very cool. And that’s a live link too so that every time I add an awesome new snippet, you can see it. Now, I just have to remember not to put any secret keys in my settings or snippets :)

Anyway. I thought this was very cool. Kudos to Shan Khan on the cool extension.

Happy coding.