VS Code Personal Settings for a Project (not affecting the project’s settings)

Here’s a quick tip on how you can have custom/personal settings for a project in VS Code, but not have them affect the project’s settings (i.e. the `.vscode/settings.json` file checked in to the repo). This is so you can have settings that are your own, but won’t affect other team members. I use this for example, to set the Peacock colors I want for my editor window.

This works by creating a workspace file with your customizations and then opening that instead of the project folder…

Workspace File With Your Settings

First, create a workspace file that will contain your personal settings. This needs to be stored outside of the folder hierarchy of your project. For example, if your project is in `~/Code/company/project`, you would create the file ~/Code/company/project.code-workspace (or any name of your choice, although I do believe the .code-workspace extension is required).

Within this file, put the settings (the same format as the normal VS Code settings.json file). e.g.:

{
  "folders": [
    {
      "path": "./project"
    }
  ],
  "settings": {
    "editor.formatOnSave": true,
    "workbench.colorCustomizations": {
      "activityBar.activeBackground": "#3399ff",
      "activityBar.background": "#3399ff",
      "activityBar.foreground": "#15202b",
      "activityBar.inactiveForeground": "#15202b99",
      "activityBarBadge.background": "#bf0060"…