Where does VSCode save the context about open files? - visual-studio-code

I am aware that I am asking for an implementation detail but I want to hack something for my use case and hence the question.
My use case: I use an on-demand instance where source code is hosted at work. This means I get a new machine (let's say every day) where I open the same source folder (but hosted on that remote machine). Because of this, the context of opened files in editor gets lost between sessions.
I am curious where does VSCode save the information about open files in a workspace. If I know that, I am hoping I can copy that file at the end of day before I give up an on-demand instance AND when I get the next instance (which may have a different remote url but same file paths), I can somehow hack this file to open all the editors from previous session in the new on-demand. Does my question make sense? Let me know if something is not clear.

On Windows the workspace state is stored here:
%APPDATA%\Code\User\workspaceStorage
And on Linux:
~/.config/Code/User/workspaceStorage
Every workspace has a subfolder here with a hashed name. To find out which one belongs to your workspace, open the contained workspace.json, which looks like this:
{
"folder": "file:///c%3A/some/path"
}
Choose the one that matches your workspace folder and copy the complete folder.
However, I am not sure how VS Code calculates the hashes for the folder names, so maybe it won't use the same hash again in your new instance. But this definitely is the place where the information is stored, so it's worth a try.

Related

Where are the information about each workspace stored?

I know that some settings such as imported folders are store on the workspace file such as my-worskapce.code-workspace and some others such as python interpreter are stored in the root folder(s?) such as .vscode/settings.json but these do not include information about opened editors or which extensions are disabled for each workspace etc. Where can I find those information?
I need that information because I started storing all my *.code-workspace files in ~/ and now it's getting cluttered and I want to move them to a different folder, when I do, and reopen my workspace, I see that all open editors are gone! This hurts my productivity as I will have to reopen them and recall which files were being worked on. And another issue is that previously added folders are gone too! I have to re-add them which is merely a redo of work that already has been done, since imported folders are imported as relative paths. If I move the *.code-workspace file to it's original location with the same name however, everything is back to normal, so this tells me VSCode is storing information about each workspace somewhere and it's bound to each *.code-workspace absolute path. I have checked ~/.config/Code/User but couldn't find anything. I've googled a lot using different keywords but seems it's nowhere documented or asked about. I usually make backups of my workspace files and I'd like to make back up of these information as well.
In windows you can find them in
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Code\User\workspaceStorage
VS Code 1.75 introduced a new Profiles feature, summarised here.
Profiles store information such as user settings, installed extensions and the current layout of panels etc.
You can export/import profiles to/from a Github gist or a local file. Different profiles are associated with each workspace.
Profiles won't resolve all your immediate issues, but may give you more flexibility in the future.

how to edit advanced new file extension vs code to work without a workspace

I found this extension called advanced-new-file by patbenatar in vs code that lets you create files anywhere with a custom directory you can create on the spot and things like that, but it only works when using a workspace. There is another one called Advanced New File by Dominik Kundel that sort of does the same thing but anywhere even if you have no workspace opened, but it has a bit less features. Does anyone know how I can modify the first one so that I can use it without having to create/open a workspace?

How to use vs code to manage scattered files?

Most of my projects have files scattered in different directories. I am just checking out vs code and am wondering if there are sufficient project management features to suit this need.
Ideally, it would have a way to place files from different locations into a named 'group'. The group could be opened and closed (I mean brought in to view, or loaded into vs code) easily via a pick list. A file could be moved from group A to group B; the file location on disk would remain the same, just it's membership in a group would change. I would want the relationsip between the groups and the related files to be savable so that the same groups and associated files would be accessible after vs code as been closed and the opened again.
vs code looks very capable, but I've only gone over a few tutorials and haven't use it for anything real yet. It does say it's file and folder centric, and OS level folders are not how these files are organized. Maybe there is a feature I've not seen yet or a plugin.
I too was looking for something similar, but unable to find a solution. I did find a work-around though. There is an extension called File Group that allows creating a group of file with full path to locations of each file. New to vsCode myself, it took me a while to figure it out, but worth the effort. Hint, once installed, go to settings, Extensions, File Group and Edit in settings.json to add your file list.

How can I search for a file in just one specific folder in VSCode when using a workspace with multiple folders?

I'm using the workspace feature of VSCode, with two projects, but it's annoying to search for a file in the front-end project and need to pass by back-end files to find the one I want.
I'm using ctrl + p to search for files.
How can I search for a file in just one folder with multiple projects opened in the workspace?
Yes thats possible: use a relative path: ./mySearchedProjectName in "files to include"-input
from HERE!
UPDATED answer to UPDATED question
The fuzzy file finder (CTRL+P or ⌘+P) somehow supports prefixing the filename with a folder, such as folder/filename to locate a file from a specific folder:
But, in my experience, the search is a bit lacking. For example, I find it usually can only find files this way if that file has been recently opened in your workspace. It also does not support regex.
The best thing that can be done is to enable including recently opened files by adding this to the workspace settings:
"settings": {
"search.quickOpen.includeHistory": true,
AFAIK, there is no other built-in way to filter the results. There are (still) open feature requests for this, like this Allow quick open to filter on folder names by typing folder name after the file. You can thumbs-up them to hopefully get them noticed.
ORIGINAL answer to ORIGINAL question
I don't know what you mean by "projects" since VS Code only has "workspaces" and "folders", such that you add folders to a workspace. I think you're already doing this, where each folder contains a separate set of codes.
With that said, the Search/Find panel has an area to specify files to include, where you can limit your search to a specific folder. For example:
Here I have 3 folders (proj 1-3) added to a workspace. I have 3 sample files with the same text.
When searching, you can set files to include to a specific folder (./proj2), so that the search results will be limited to that folder.
I've found the best solution to this for me (though it's still a sub-optimal one) is simply to run multiple VS Code instances, one for each folder.
It's a pain to start up, but once you get things going (and hopefully you're not restarting often on your dev machine, so this is less of an issue) it works perfectly: you can search for files with only the relevant ones showing up.
Also, if you want to reduce the start-up pain you can make a shortcut/alias/etc. in your operating system that starts both at once.

Can I search Netbeans' local history?

In one of the previous versions of one of my file in a Netbeans project I wrote code that I later removed, and now I want to retrieve it. However now I can't find it when I manually go to previous versions, as I have many versions in the local history of this file, and I don;t remember when exactly I wrote this code.
Is there a way to run a search on the local history of this file?
I saw in this answer that the local history is kept in this path
<HOME>/.netbeans/<NB_VERSION>/var/filehistory where HOME is my user home and NB_VERSION is the version of NetBeans (e.g. 7.0).
I tried running AgentRansack on that directory, but to no avail.
I recently had to solve this problem and figured it out. Netbeans stores local history files in your user directory as mentioned above. Inside that folder are numbered directories. It's pretty easy to guess which one you need based on the modification date of the folder (if you know when you last looked at it, so that doesn't help you much). In side the numbered folders is another folder with a hashed name, and inside of that folder is a set of files: a data file, and numbered files. The data file can be read with a binary file reader, and if viewed in ascii mode will show the filename that this history belongs to. The numbered files are actually zip files and they have full versions of the file in them. Just unzip those and open with a text editor if they are plain text files.
Hope this helps you out, but I realize its probably too late now. I had to figure this out because I had opened a remote file with netbeans (a file that was not associated with a project), and couldn't get back into the Local History because the file didn't have a project. However I could see it in the Local history by reading the data file, and I just guessed that the other files were zipped by the fact that they started with "PK" in the binary viewer. Once I put it all together I was home free.