❄️ My Personal VSCode Setup ❄️

My Nix-based VSCode configuration. For when you have an unhealthy obsession for declarativity and configurability.

Usage

Option 1: Clone and run

git clone https://github.com/fred-drake/vscode.git
nix run .#

Option 2: Run directly

nix run github:fred-drake/vscode#

To run in a specific directory

nix run github:fred-drake/vscode# -- .

Configurations

The default configuration performs editing without settings for any particular language or technology. The following configurations a development environment in their respective language or technology stack:

• Rust - nix run github:fred-drake/vscode#rust
• C# - nix run github:fred-drake/vscode#csharp
• Go - nix run github:fred-drake/vscode#golang
• Python - TBD
• Javascript - TBD
• Infrastructure as Code - TBD

User Data

All user data is stored in ~/.config/vscode/<config_name>. This includes extensions, settings, keybindings, application state, etc. The decision to have a hard separation by configuration prevented weird issues with extensions for different configurations bleeding into each other when open at the same time. This comes at the cost of disk space.

VSCode doesn't separate configurations into neater folders like ~/.local and ~/.config, so the settings.json that is generated from the configuration must cohabitate with other files that will be perpetually modified by VSCode itself.

Install Multiple Configurations

You can have multiple neovim configurations (code, code-rust, code-golang, etc). Take a look at my system configuration flake to see how I do this, but here's the gist:

Create a function that creates neovim links with unique configuration names:

  mkVSCodePackages = pkgs: vscodePkgs: let
    mkVSCodeAlias = name: pkg:
      pkgs.runCommand "vscode-${name}" {} ''
        mkdir -p $out/bin
        ln -s ${pkg}/bin/code $out/bin/code-${name}
      '';
  in
    builtins.mapAttrs mkVSCodeAlias vscodePkgs;

And add it to your home-manager imports:

  ({pkgs, ...}: {
    home.packages =
      (builtins.attrValues (mkVSCodePackages pkgs inputs.vscode.packages.${pkgs.system}))
      ++ [inputs.vscode.packages.${pkgs.system}.default];
  })

Technology Support

Technology	Formatter	Language Server	Debugger	Nix Configuration
Nix	alejandra	nixd		default
Just	just			default
Markdown	prettier	marksman		default
YAML	yamlfmt	yamllint		default
CSS	prettier			default
HTML	prettier			default
JSON	prettier			default
TOML	Even Better TOML	Even Better TOML		default
SQL	SQL Tools	SQLTools		default
C#	CSharpier	C# Dev Kit	C# Dev Kit	csharp
Rust	rust-analyzer	rust-analyzer	CodeLLDB	rust
Go	golines	Go Language Server	Delve	golang

Managing Extensions

All extension names are stored in the vscode-extensions.toml file. To generate (or update to latest) the raw extensions file from this TOML file, call just update-extensions. The the main nix flake pulls this extension information in order to declaratively build VSCode and its extensions. Think of the extensions file as the lock file for all of your VSCode extensions.

Global Extensions and Settings

The global-configuration.nix file contains the extensions and settings that will be used across all configurations. See the main nix flake to see how configurations add their extensions and settings. Note that if there is a settings conflict, the configuration-specific setting will overwrite the global setting.

Impure Extensions Support

Some extensions (such as Microsoft's C# Dev Kit) do not support the pure Nix declarative way. For configurations that require such extensions, an alternate derivation is made such that while VSCode itself is declarative, extensions are installed through VSCode itself and stored in ~/.config/vscode/<config_name>/extensions. The tradeoffs from what we would ideally prefer through Nix are:

• Unlike the "pure" equivalent, you will always install the latest version of the extension, not the exact one defined in extensions.nix.
• To update extensions through a nix rebuild, you need to delete the ~/.config/vscode/<config_name>/extensions directory.