Vscode offers three levels for editing settings:

• Globally
• Folder
• Workspace

Each level has a couple of methods.

Globally

Any changes you make this way will take global effect - i.e. they will affect all your vscode projects.

You can edit your settings at this level in two ways. The first is via the settings menu, accessed by clicking the gear icon on the bottom left of the page followed by selecting the user tab at the top of the page. See below.

You can also alter your global settings by editing the global settings.json file. This file is usually in one of these locations:

• Windows: %APPDATA%\Code\User\settings.json
• MacOs: $HOME/Library/Application Support/Code/User/settings.json
• Linux: $HOME/.config/Code/User/settings.json

A quicker way of editing this is to use the vscode command palette which can be accessed using Ctrl Shift P (or Cmd Shift P on a Mac). Type in Open settings json and select the option Preferences: Open Settings (JSON). You can now edit your settings at the global level in settings.json.

Folder

If you want to alter settings but only have them apply at the folder level then create a .vscode directory in the target folder. Next create a settings.json file in that folder. Add any and all folder level settings to this file.

Remember that this file needs to have json format:

{
  "key":"value"
}

Workspace

Finally, you can edit the settings of a vscode workspace (create a workspace by hitting File > Save Workspace As...). This one is a little different as it does not use a settings.json file, instead when vscode creates a workspace it adds a file called your_workspace.code-workspace.

Open that file and you will see something like

{
	"folders": [
		{
			"path": "/Path/to/project"
		}
	]
}

You can add settings to this file by adding a "settings" property to the object:

{
	"folders": [
		{
			"path": "/Path/to/project"
		}
  ],
  "settings": {
    "key": "value"
  }
}

And that’s it, now you know how to alter the settings in vscode at 3 different levels.

Thanks for reading!