Visual Studio Code – How to disable automatic pairing of triple backticks in VS Code in Markdown files while keeping other auto-pairings?

You can edit the language configuration file yourself. The only problem is that if it is ever updated by the vscode team you will have to re-do your changes.

On a Windows system, the relevant file is located at:

C:UsersMarkAppDataLocalProgramsMicrosoft VS Coderesourcesappextensionsmarkdown-basicslanguage-configuration.json

Here is what the autoClosingPairs key/value looks like for a markdown file:

  "autoClosingPairs": [
    {
      "open": "{",
      "close": "}"
    },
    {
      "open": "[",
      "close": "]"
    },
    {
      "open": "(",
      "close": ")"
    },
    {
      "open": "<",
      "close": ">",
      "notIn": [
        "string"
      ]
    },
    {
      "open": "`",       // consider deleting this as well
      "close": "`"
    },
    {
      "open": "```",    // delete this {} entry and save
      "close": "```"
    }
  ],

You might want to make a back-up of that file first.

I wrote an extension, Custom Language Properties, which has a command to show the language configuration file of the active editor:

Custom Language Properties: Show language configuration for current editor

It will open the relevant file (and the editor tab context menu Copy Path has its full path). In the editor which is opened you can edit and save the document. A reload is necessary for the edited language configuration file to take effect.

And you will no longer get autoclosing of triple backticks. But there is sone issue, if you type 3 backticks in a row now vscode considers the third bactick to be part of an autoclosingPair itself and adds a fourth backtick…arg @#$.

That can be solved by also deleting the

    {
      "open": "`",       // consider deleting this as well
      "close": "`"
    },

making sure you don’t leave any hanging commas in the json file.

BTW, I hate the triple backtick completion too.

You should also upvote this issue: LanguageConfiguration interface should expose autoClosingPairs which would also allow my extension and others to fix the problem easily. In fact, this already works but since the api is still proposed so it cannot be published. But in testing it works as expected.

Demo is in a markdown file. Auto-closing works for {}()[]<> but not backticks because I excluded them in this extension’s settings.