There is a nearly limitless number of settings you can customize
to your liking in VS Code.
I can't begin to show you all of them here,
but I will show you a few ways to discover what's available and a
couple of ways to apply your preferences.
I'll start by opening the command palette.
I'll search for the word "settings."
Notice in the search results that you can edit both user and
workspace settings.
You can also edit each of those directly in a JSON file or in a
traditional user interface.
I'm going to start with user settings in the traditional UI.
From here, I can scroll through the available settings in the
middle of the screen, or expand and click on different
sections here on the left to jump to different groups of settings.
Another useful option is the search box near the top.
You don't have to know the exact name of the setting you're
looking for.
For example, I'll type the word "font" into the box.
That immediately filters the settings to just those that have
something to do with fonts.
It found 43 results. I can now review and adjust.
I can further filter these results with the filter button on the
far right of the search box.
I'll click it and then choose "Modified."
Now, I can see settings related to fonts that I've changed from
the default value.
It's showing me the editor's font size, which I've already
changed to 24
to make it a little easier for you to read in the recording.
I'll now clear the search box,
click the filter button again, and this time, select "Language."
I can now start typing the name of a programming language,
and it will filter the settings to just those that apply
to that language.
I'll type JavaScript.
That lets me view a very long list of options I can set for it.
I'll leave them as they are for now and clear the search box.
A great way to browse settings is with the expandable sections
on the left.
Here
inside the Workbench section, I'll click on "Appearance."
If you want to change the way VS Code looks,
all the settings you need are neatly grouped here in one place.
For instance, I can easily change the location of the activity
bar or the color theme.
The UI is nice and fairly intuitive,
but sometimes I find it faster to edit settings directly in the JSON
file where they're stored.
You can switch from the UI to the JSON settings editor by clicking
this little button in the upper right corner of the screen,
with the tiny arrow on it.
That opens a file named settings.json that contains all the
user settings I've modified from their default values.
Let's add another one of this list.
If you look over to the right margin of the editor,
you might be able to make out a tiny version of the text you see
in the main part of the editor.
This is called the minimap and gives you a tiny preview of
the file you have open.
You can drag it up and down to move to different parts
of the file.
I don't personally find the minimap very helpful and like
to turn it off.
I can do that here in the JSON editor,
even though I don't know the exact name of the setting
I'm looking for.
I'll add a comma after the last setting in the list,
and then start typing minimap inside quotation marks.
The code completion help brings up a list of settings related
to the minimap.
The one that sounds like what I want is editor.minimap.enabled.
I'll arrow down to that and then press the tab key to
add it to the file.
I'll then change the value to false.
As you can see on Line 5, I have these codes autosave
feature turned on.
So as soon as I make that change, the file is saved and the minimap
immediately disappears from my editor.
I'll now close the JSON editor.
I'm now back in the settings editor UI.
Notice in the upper left section of the screen, there are tabs
labeled User and Workspace.
User settings apply across all of your projects,
but Workspace settings give you the option to override User
settings for a particular project.
From here, I'll type cursor blink in the search box.
I'm going to change that setting for this project from
blink to solid.
I'll open a file on the project and put my cursor at the
end of Line 1,
and you can see it's no longer blinking.
Also notice that when you add Workspace settings to a project,
you'll get a new folder added to your project named .vscode.
It contains a settings.json file with the settings that are
specific to this workspace.
Okay. The last thing I want to show you about settings is how you
can sync them across computers in case you work on
multiple machines.
I'll open the command palette and search for settings sync.
I'll select "Backup and Sync Settings."
I'm then shown a list of settings I can choose to backup and sync.
I'll use the defaults and click the "Sign in" button.
I'm then given the option to sign in with GitHub or Microsoft to
store the settings I want to sync.
I'm not going to do that right now,
but keep that option in mind if you work on more than
one computer.
There are literally thousands of different settings you can
customize to help you work as efficiently as possible
in VS Code.
You should definitely explore them and see what's possible.
Just don't let them distract you too long from actually
writing code.
Coming up, we'll explore further customizations you can make to
your VS Code environment with extensions.