Preferences Inheritance

VS Code extension that allows sharing common preferences across profiles, workspaces, and projects through inheritance. It even allows fetching preferences from the web. Motivated by this VS Code issue

Features

More precisely, this extension merges the given source of config files into a final config file that can be placed wherever you want.

Example Scenario

Config:

# .vscode/settings.json
{
    "targets": [
        {
            "sources": [
                "https://url.to/online/root/settings.json", // can fetch from remote url
                {
                    "path": "path/to/local/base/settings.json", // verbose, specify type
                    "type": "jsonc"
                },
                "path/to/c++/project/settings.json" // simple path, type inferred from file ext
            ],
            "output": "path/to/my/profile/workspace/.vscode/settings.json"
        }
    ],
    "notifyOnMerge": true,
    "mergeOnStartup": true,
    "watchSources": true
}

This config can be placed at the workspace, .vscode, or profile level. The extension will merge the sources into a final output config that gets applied. This way, I keep my setting files DRY and can reuse or combine them across multiple projects and environments however I want.

Requirements

The extension won't do anything before specifying preferencesInheritance.targets.

Extension Settings

All paths supports the following variables: ${workspaceFolder}, ${env.some_environment_variable}

This extension contributes the following settings:

preferencesInheritance.targets:

Example:

output: { path: "out.json", type: "json" } // for output, type can be [json, text, yaml]

or, just a string, will derive type from extension or default to json

output: "out.json"

sources: [{ path: "test1.json", type: "jsonc" }, ...] // for source, type can be [json, jsonc, text, yaml] or, just a string, content is merged (or concatenated in case of type=text) first to last.

sources: ["test1.json", { path: "test2.txt", type: "text"}, ...]
preferencesInheritance.mergeOnStartup: Merge preferences on startup.
preferencesInheritance.notifyOnMerge: Notify when preferences are merged.
preferencesInheritance.notifyOnNewWorkspace: Notify about merges being active (if list of merge sources is non-empty) when a new workspace is opened.
preferencesInheritance.watchSources: Watch sources for changes and merge on change.
preferencesInheritance.fetchContentCacheTime: Time in seconds to cache fetched web content. Default is 60 * 5 seconds.

Release Notes