Unwanted extensions

This extensions, tries to help out with extensions which are not recommended for specific workspaces.

↗️Successor

This is the continuation of the previous extension Unwanted Recommendations which is not maintained anymore.
The extension therefore had to be migrated to a new publisher.

📖 Blog post

I have written a more complete blog post about the whole topic and this extension, 👀 read it here

🚧 Details / Situation

Until now, it seems not to be possible to automate enabling or disabling extensions per project/workspace.
The VSCode Team introduced profiles, which went into a good direction and might be the solution in the future for that.

But still, there seem to be issues or unsupported details, like

• Deprecating specific extensions for a workspace
• Also handling SemVer with extensions is a topic

Until then, its not easy to handle it. This extension tries to improve the experience for developers.

🧩 Features

Define unwanted extensions in extensions.json

This extension allows you to put unwanted extensions, into the already existing .vscode/extensions.json file, which already seems to kind of support the property unwantedRecommendations. Simply put your vscode extension id's in this array.

Following is a possible example for using Volar, and check for disabled Vetur, Typescript Vue Plugin amd (@builtin) Typescript Language Features:

{
    "recommendations": [
        "vue.volar"
    ],
    "unwantedRecommendations": [
        "vscode.typescript-language-features",
        "octref.vetur",
        "vue.vscode-typescript-vue-plugin"
    ]
}

Note: This extension is only handling the unwantedRecommendations, as the recommendations are already handled by VSCode.

🗒️ What does this extension do

• This extension will automatically run if the .vscode/extensions.json file exists. (When opening the folder/workspace).
• If there are unwantedRecommendations, it will go through them and check if the extension is enabled.
• If it is enabled, it will show a warning message including an info to disabled the extension manually.
• After all extensions are checked, a popup will ask to show all extensions in the extension-gallery.

After the user disabled manually all unwanted extensions, the workspace should work fine, even after restarts/reboots.

🖼️ Screenshots

If unwantedRecommendations are defined

1. When opening a project, this extension checks all configured unwantedRecommendations and reports the still enabled extensions:

2. After click "yes" on the provided popup, it will bring you to the extensions, to disable them manually: (list will be already filtered to the specific extensions)

3. You / the user can now disable the extensions manually - preferably using the Disable (Workspace) action

4. On the next restart/reload of vscode, the extension will check again and notify that all is fine (if all unwantedRecommendations-extensions are disabled)

No unwanted extensions defined

Further when there is no extension defined as unwantedRecommendations, this extension will show the following information:

1. When manually checking using the command (see below) and no extensions.json file exist:

2. No unwantedRecommendations configured within extension.json

▶️ Run the check manually

This extensions runs automatically when you open your project including the .vscode/extensions.json You can also execute the check manually, using the vscode command

• Check for unwanted extensions

❗ Requirements

.vscode/extensions.json should contain the list of unwanted extensions within the unwantedRecommendations property. See above for details.

Workspaces / Multi-root workspaces

You can use the above approach if you are running a workspace. Just place the .vscode/extensions.json file into your workspace root directory.

Alternatively you can also put the unwanted extensions within your ***.code-workspace file.

{
 "extensions": {
  "unwantedRecommendations": [
   "octref.vetur",
  ]
 }
}

🎉 Sponsors

The extension was developed by Fabian Gander aka Cyclodex.

The initial version was sponsored by GARAIO AG. Thanks!