The new version of VSCode 1.75 contains the new function Profiles, which I was waiting for.
It looks like you can install, activate or deactivate extensions in each profile, without affecting the other profiles.
So far I only managed to install, activate or deactivate extensions via the extension manager, or via the view page of the respective extension.
There is this new view that can be displayed via [Settings-Wheel]–[profiles]–[show contents]
There you can find a checkbox for each extension.
Intuitively, one would assume that the extensions for a profile can be either completely switched on or off (install) or at least activated / deactivated.
For me this checkbox has none of the mentioned effects.
The profiles work nevertheless, as said, with an activated profile extensions can be installed and uninstalled, the profiles can then be switched, and a profiles extension states get properly restored when reselected.
However, the view with these checkboxes seems largely pointless to me at the moment.
So my question is: what is their purpose?
Should their purpose be what I suspected, and the feature just isn’t "ready" yet?
2
Answers
I’m pretty sure the purpose of those checkboxes is to select whether or not each extension gets exported as part of the profile. Presumably they are all activated upon importing the profile and installing those profile extensions.
The checkboxes are for exporting the profile without including undesired configuration options. For example, the "UI State" option will save the currently open menus and submenus as a part of the profile’s configuration, which you likely don’t really want in most cases.
Notably, when I created a new blank profile and accessed this menu the only field present was the UI State, which implies that if a field is the same as the default configuration it won’t be saved to the file.
When you export, you can name the profile and either save it locally as a ".code-profile" file, or upload it directly to GitHub as a gist. The file uses a syntax that I believe is unique, though it’s very possible I just don’t know it. It would be nice to have a simple JSON schema, but I’m sure the community is going to automate the hell out of this process within a few weeks/days.