Shared VS Code snippets 🫱🏼

The concept

The idea is to check your code snippets into source control so they can be shared with others.

How to make it work

In order to do this, we must:

Create (or clone) a git repo to house the snippets in a part of the file system that we can control (e.g., in our 'projects' directory).
Then create a (local) symbolic link connecting our snippets repo to the directory that VS Code looks at for its snippets.

Creating the link on Mac

Something like:

ln -s  /Users/<USER>/<YOUR FOLDER>/vscode-snippets/snippets/   /Users/<USER>/Library/Application\ Support/Code/User/snippets

Creating the link on Windows

Something like:

mklink /D  c:\Users\<USER>\AppData\Roaming\Code\User\snippets  c:\<YOUR FOLDER>\vscode-snippets\snippets

⚠️ What to watch out for!

By default, when you edit a snippet in VS Code for the first time, it creates a new .json file in its default snippets directory. But in our case we're using a directory in a different location as our source-of-truth. So we may need to be careful when editing the snippets via the normal flow that VS Code provides. I think we need to make sure it doesn't create snippet files in its default location.

Resources

See this article, particularly, the "syncing" section.