Allow to scope settings by platform

[arnaud-lecat]

Hi

I develop on 3 different platform. When synchronizing settings, snippets and so on, i often must change path, adjust font-size, etc...

So, it could be great if we had a per platform settings set (Windows, Mac, Unix)

[dbaeumer]

@bpasero, @aeschli FYI.

[bpasero]

#8962

[Tyriar]

#8962 is about keybindings, not settings

[sandy081]

Planning for October to Kickoff

[tn-072]

What about this:

{
    // ...
    "[sys:win]": {
            "python.defaultInterpreterPath": "<my python path on windows>",
    },
    "[sys:linux]": {
            "python.defaultInterpreterPath": "<my python path on linux>",
    },
    "[sys:osx]": {
            "python.defaultInterpreterPath": "<my python path on Mac>"
    },
    // ...
}

which uses similar syntax like language-specific settings:

{
    // ...
    "[cpp]": {
        "editor.formatOnSave": true,
        "editor.defaultFormatter": "llvm-vs-code-extensions.vscode-clangd",
    },
    // ...
}

[sdholden]

Some sort of solution is long overdue...any progress?

[buzcarter]

I'll second @tn-072 's suggestion.

{
    "editor.fontSize": 14,
    "python.pythonPath": "/usr/local/bin/python3",
    "[windows]": {
        "editor.fontSize": 16,
        "python.pythonPath": "C:\\Python39\\python.exe"
    },
    "[mac]": {
        "editor.fontSize": 18,
        "python.pythonPath": "/usr/local/bin/python3"
    },
    // ... the shared bits
}

[sanmai-NL]

Instead of scoping by 'platform' I suggest to scope by user-defined tag(s), to support use cases where the same OS is used for different purposes (e.g. work Linux, personal Linux) beyond what profiles can offer.

[heartacker]

Instead of scoping by 'platform' I suggest to scope by user-defined tag(s), to support use cases where the same OS is used for different purposes (e.g. work Linux, personal Linux) beyond what profiles can offer.

What you say is profile

[sanmai-NL]

Then all combinations of language, macOS/Linux/Windows, work/personal would need to be separate profiles.

[starball5]

I ctrl+f-ed for "profile" and several times when the profiles approach came up in past discussion, it was dismissed because at the time, it required creating a standalone copy of settings, and there was no way to inherit from the default. For those people, see #156144, which as released in July 2023. I'm not saying this is the solution. I'm just saying it may be more attractive as a workaround than it had been previously.

[jd-solanki]

Why it's still in backlog?

[pfeerick]

I'd love to see this feature for the some of the above reasons such as OS and path specific differences, but also because I set the new option

"terminal.integrated.middleClickBehavior": "paste"

which works great on Windows, but on Linux (which picks up the setting because I have Settings Sync enabled), it makes it paste the clipboard content + selection rather than just the selection, so I've had to set it back to default now. 🤣

[starball5]

@pfeerick oh interesting. Are you aware of "editor.selectionClipboard": false,? See also https://stackoverflow.com/q/36723333/11107541

[Poikilos]

Then all combinations of language, macOS/Linux/Windows, work/personal would need to be separate profiles.

If you have a work and personal account on your linux/macOS/Windows machine, that is 6 accounts. If you need it that fine-grained, you could already just put the setting in your user profile. It isn't directly related to this. There is no way to detect if you are work or personal...that is a user-level abstract distinction.

[pfeerick]

@pfeerick oh interesting. Are you aware of "editor.selectionClipboard": false,? See also

No I wasn't... thanks for that!. It fixes the "double" paste (one from selection, one from clipboard), but does mean you must use the clipboard if using middleClickBehavior": "paste", so still not ideal. Spotted terminal.integrated.copyOnSelection as well though which I didn't know about... that would work if just working with terminal, and not wanting to mix editor and terminal.

[alexchexes]

In the meantime (the discussion has lasted 8 years and doesn't seem to be progressing), how do you all set a comfortable font when switching machines? On my MacBook, I'm good with a 12px font, but on my Windows machine, I need at least 14px. What do you do in such cases (when Settings Sync is On)?

[sanmai-NL]

You can use settings profiles nowadays. Maybe you can template them?

[alexchexes]

@sanmai-NL
Could you please provide a bit more detail about your suggestion? I checked out the VSCode documentation, but it seems that templates refer to a predefined set of configurations used for different programming languages or common environments. Not sure how I could use that to keep all my settings in sync while having different font sizes on Mac and Windows...

[sanmai-NL]

I mean templating VS Code settings with an external tool, and putting the per-OS outputs in a dotfiles repository.

[hermes85pl]

What do you do in such cases (when Settings Sync is On)?

@alexchexes, one solution would be to treat such settings as device-specific and put them under settingsSync.ignoredSettings.

[iwangbowen]

Any updates

[rnetonet]

Please, this will be so useful!

[JamesSwivel]

I guess platform-specific settings are useful. For example, I want to have one settings.json that can address Windows and Linux Python virtualenv requirements. For example below

{
  "windows": {
     "python.defaultInterpreterPath": ".\\winEnv\\Scripts\\python.exe",
  },
  "linux": {  
      "python.defaultInterpreterPath": "${env:HOME}/.pyenv/versions/3.11.8/envs/virtualenvX/bin/python3",

}

Any suggestion to address this common Python requirement?

[Hirak232]

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[eeplus-oka]

When standardizing environment settings across project teams, I think the easiest way is to distribute the settings.json along with the source code. How about splitting the files in a similar way to Visual Studio's appsettings.json (e.g., appsettings.development.json and appsettings.production.json)?

• settings.json
• settings.[platform].json
• settings.windows.json
• settings.macos.json