How to reset VSCode extensions for a workspace - visual-studio-code

Question

I was having issues with a workspace so I tried disabling all of extensions for it. Then the only option was to enable all extensions for the workspace. I have extensions globally configured to be off or on, but I'm not sure how to get a workspace to reset to the global extensions now?
I know I can open a new window up and start manually enable/disabling the extensions in my workspace to match the new fresh window. The problem is that it would then have its own workspace extensions defined, so if I toggled one at a global level it would still have an override.
I also tried deleting the .vscode folder in the workspace, but that doesn't seem to change the extensions for the workspace.

Answer 1

It's not a great method but I guess this works with a lot of manual leg work.
Enable all extensions for workspace
Open a new VSCode window
Goto extensions and filter by #disabled
You can also do #enabled and disable all extensions in the first step if you have more disabled than enabled.
Now you have a list you can target. Just click Disable instead of Disable for Workspace.
I believe this should get your workspace back to normal. There has to be an easier way though. You may also have to toggle enabled extensions to disabled and then back to enabled in case it has a workspace override for them -- I didn't check how it would behave if a new window disabled the extension whether or not it would keep staying on.

Answer 2

I've found a way to reset all settings for a given workspace.
First, navigate to ~/.config/Code/User/workspaceStorage. Inside there, you'll find a lot of folders with seemingly random names. Each folder seems to represent one workspace.
# cd ~/.config/Code/User/workspaceStorage
# ls -la
total 156
drwxr-xr-x 39 micael micael 4096 Feb 18 15:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 micael micael 4096 Nov 15 13:05 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 micael micael 4096 Jan 18 16:09 0cf549e23d37c32c70a7e30998ade1fe
drwxr-xr-x 3 micael micael 4096 Dec 29 17:42 1b637cb30f6c3acc9273df20c84be7aa
drwxr-xr-x 2 micael micael 4096 Jan 17 22:09 2010f3fb6dbb2574f12a5ba614b3b136
drwxr-xr-x 2 micael micael 4096 Feb 18 15:01 a09a9ab934662794ac48730fc950a654
...
Inside each folder, there's a workspace.json file that contains the path of the folder your workspace was created from.
We can use grep to quickly search all those folders for a matching string:
grep -r 'myfolder' ., where myfolder should be the name of the folder your workspace is using.
In this example, my workspace was created from a folder called python-playground:
# grep -r 'python-playground' .
./a09a9ab934662794ac48730fc950a654/workspace.json: "folder": "file:///home/micael/projects/python-playground"
grep: ./a09a9ab934662794ac48730fc950a654/state.vscdb: binary file matches
grep: ./a09a9ab934662794ac48730fc950a654/state.vscdb.backup: binary file matches
In my case, the folder I'm looking for is ./a09a9ab934662794ac48730fc950a654.
You'll likely get a few results, all inside the same folder. Let's first take a look inside the folder:
# ls -la a09a9ab934662794ac48730fc950a654
total 64
drwxr-xr-x 2 micael micael 4096 Feb 18 15:01 .
drwxr-xr-x 39 micael micael 4096 Feb 18 15:00 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 micael micael 28672 Feb 18 15:01 state.vscdb
-rw-r--r-- 1 micael micael 24576 Feb 18 15:01 state.vscdb.backup
-rw-r--r-- 1 micael micael 64 Feb 18 15:00 workspace.json
# cat a09a9ab934662794ac48730fc950a654/workspace.json
{
"folder": "file:///home/micael/projects/python-playground"
}%
Now, we can either remove this folder or move it elsewhere. Make sure to close VSCode before doing so.
# rm -rf a09a9ab934662794ac48730fc950a654