Feature Request: Editor/Extension profiles per project

[lunsdorf]

Since VSCode became a solid platform for developing software in many different languages, it would be nice to have something like an editor profile per project, so that only relevant extensions would be loaded for that project. Ideally, extensions could be installed automatically if I would checkout an existing project that contains a profile and requires extensions that I don't have, yet.

[leocb]

Yes! This would be very useful, maybe also add a menu with workspaces that set the active extensions, configuration and themes, just like adobe does with their products. For example, one could create a workspace named Angular development, then another one named PHP development, with a option to save the current configuration to the project folder and some way to manage and edit/copy the workspaces.
Such options would make the process of creating the scaffold a lot easier for new projects and would help teams sincronize their environments.

[jcrben]

Seems like #40239 would be covered by this?

[lunsdorf]

Indeed, both of these features seem to target the same goal.

[jcrben]

There's also Persisting "disable by workspace" settings in source control

The fact that there's currently an enable by workspace which saves to local storage makes it seem like at least the above may not be a very big lift.

@lunsdorf perhaps close this as a duplicate to focus attention on the the above issue? also you can already put recommended extensions in a workspace file

Since #15611 shipped, I can disable an extension globally and enable it only for a workspace - which is a lot better than a bunch of global extensions which can step on each other...

[lunsdorf]

@jcrben Which issue do you refer to, #18386 or #40239? I think the latter one is more like a subset of this one. Implementation of #15611 is great, although I don't know how installation of new extensions is handled by that.
The way I though about this was, that if I am a new developer on an existing project, I would simply checkout the source files, open it in VSCode and the editor would then ask me if it should install/configure all depending extensions and if I would hit the "yes" button everything would be setup and ready to go :-)

Besides that I agree on focusing on just one issue and wouldn't mind closing this one if the other requests the same feature.

[jcrben]

I think #40239 should be closed as duplicating this one.

And I think this one would be best implemented by focusing on improving the current system with #18386.

I would simply checkout the source files, open it in VSCode and the editor would then ask me if it should install/configure all depending extensions

There's already Extension Recommendations https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/multi-root-workspaces#_extension-recommendations - does that not accomplish the prompt for install? A similar recommendation system also applies for the folder-level settings.json as well I think.

So the last step is to automatically enable extensions after installing them, which is covered by #18386 - we also need to be able to persist extensions as disabled globally in our settings.

Perhaps the recommendations could be improved - maybe we specify that the extensions should be installed, but default to only enabled in the workspace or something? #39272 also gets into this where the extensions are basically entirely scoped to a project

[lunsdorf]

Closing this issue in favor of #18386 and #39272.

[jcrben]

If everyone who voted for this would vote for those two, it might get noticed more. That #15611 had 61 votes and I think most of those people really would like this more complete solution (@sandy081).

Also, for per-project profiles while sharing a team project settings, there's Add ability to extend from other settings files which I discussed in a bit more detail at https://stackoverflow.com/a/49213663/4200039