Highlight most important settings in README.md

[EdTheC]

As a newbie VSCode user, I am having trouble with settings. It's not clear from the documentation where settings (eg "projectManager.projectsLocation": "C\Users\myUser\AppData\Roaming\Code\User") would be added or changed.

Also, the $home concept needs a bit more explanation as it seems very powerful.

Could you please add a little to the docs to help out?

TIA

[alefragnani]

Hi @EdTheC ,

I don't think that the extensions should say how to configure VSCode, since the VSCode website already has a rich documentation area (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/customization/userandworkspace). But yes, the extension's README.md could highlight the settings that matters most

I will make a few tweaks in the README.md, giving attention to this in the next release.

Hope this helps

[jb510]

PM is the first package most users will install, they're going to be more naive to the ways of VSC that most.

I too can't figure out where to put the settings for
projectManager.vscode.ignoredFolders and projectManager.vscode.baseFolders

Do these go in settings.json or on projects.json? Is there a way to make them project root relative?

I'm used to sublime text's project where I can specific exactly which folders I want to see in the folder tree, just trying to recreate that.

related #46

[alefragnani]

I'm sorry for taking so long to answer you. I saw your comment but weren't able to reply at the time and at the end, I forgot 😢 .

The settings described in README.md must be defined in settings.json, which you access via User Settings. The settings.json is where you configure VSCode and its extensions. If you intend to create root relative settings, you must use Workspace Settings, but this extension does not support workspace relative settings.

The projects.json file is where the this extension stores the projects that you saved. It's an internal file and you don't need to touch it, because the Project Manager: Save Project command is responsible for storing new projects. But, if you intend to manually add/remove/update projects, then yes, you have to touch it with Project Manager: Edit Projects command.

Multi folder projects, on the other hand, is not available in VSCode yet. There is already an issue there, and it appears that they will start experimenting in December/January_ Insiders release.

Hope this helps

[jb510]

Thanks! Note however that the reason I was asking about directly editing the projects.json file was because I'd really like to import 20 projects and it's way easier just edit the .json file than to open and save them all the manual way.

Looking forward to multi folder support. SublimeText 3's Project Manager does a fabulous job of including/excluding files and folders from multiple locations. I've come rely heavily on this "cleaner" workspace environment than what VSC provides.

[alefragnani]

I thought you wanted to import 😄 . That's one of the reasons that I created the VSCode projects auto-detection support. Next month I will release Git and SVN support as well.

I also used SublimeText for some time (still uses for large files) but personally don't like how the projects are stored. Having a Projects Folder to store project definition files all together was a mess (at least for my workflows). In the end, I prefer how VSCode works 😄

I hope the VSCode team takes the best ideas of Sublime Text and Atom when designing this, so all users would like.

[jb510]

Well, "import" yes, but using same basic text editing instead of opening/saving dozens of projects. It's way easier to just copy/paste/edit/paste/edit/paste/edit... than to locate/open/save/locate/open/save...

I'm a bit confused by your description of projects in sublime. I think sublime works both ways now, project definitions in a central location, or in the project folder itself. When I first started with sublime the project definition being a file in the project folder seemed messy to me, but I came around though and can't imagine it any other way. Much like a .gitignore file being part of the repo it just makes sense to me to have my .sublime-project/workspace files in the root folder of the project. I then use the multiple paths to target my actual working folders (screenshot). My .git repo is a level down from that, which also means I can have "other" folder in the project but not in the repo without gitignoring them (like project notes) or inside the repo (like project notes to share).

This setup make me love projects in sublime, it's neat and quick to use.

I think you're referring to the optional setup where project files in one central location which always sounded crazy to me too...

[alefragnani]

Yes, I was refering to the central location, because only with that I was able to switch between all projects (appearing in Projects menu). Based on that workflow, I didn't know Sublime had .sublime-project support. Maybe was added after I switched to Atom (or only in version 3 - I started using version 2).

That's exacly how VSCode works, but instead of a file, it has a folder (.vscode) because besides the workspace settings its inside that folder that you have tasks defined.