Vscode extensions: cake + eat

gilescope · July 30, 2021, 8:58am

I’ve been struggling with how to be happy with vscode extensions. I want home-manager to install vscode + a bunch of extensions but I want the freedom to add more. (I’ve decided that allowing home manager to manage the vscode settings is a bad idea - I need them mutable.)

(Let’s be honest here: not using nix installed extensions for extensions with native components is not pleasant. So I really do want to find this half-way house)

vscode has a system extensions dir that allow extensions to be added in there (vscode itself is mostly a set of extensions). If we could add our vscode extensions there then we could add / remove user ones ourselves and be happy. Given MS doesn’t prioritize implementing any form of global extensions or settings, this for a while could be as good as it gets.

sudo code --extensions-dir /usr/share/code/resources/app/extensions
 --user-data-dir </path/to/a/users/homefolder/.vscode/>

Has anyone already attempted this? I’m wondering what I might need to override in an extension to get it to install to the system extensions dir.

pasqui23 · July 30, 2021, 9:53pm

the .withExtension wrapper already does that

github.com

NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/59b5408b331bb03ecef36201283b297519fee0d3/pkgs/applications/editors/vscode/with-extensions.nix#L74


      
            meta = vscode.meta;
          } ''
            mkdir -p "$out/bin"
            mkdir -p "$out/share/applications"
            mkdir -p "$out/share/pixmaps"
          
          
  ln -sT "${vscode}/share/pixmaps/code.png" "$out/share/pixmaps/code.png"
            ln -sT "${vscode}/share/applications/${executableName}.desktop" "$out/share/applications/${executableName}.desktop"
            ln -sT "${vscode}/share/applications/${executableName}-url-handler.desktop" "$out/share/applications/${executableName}-url-handler.desktop"
            makeWrapper "${vscode}/bin/${executableName}" "$out/bin/${executableName}" ${lib.optionalString (vscodeExtensions != []) ''
              --add-flags "--extensions-dir ${combinedExtensionsDrv}/share/vscode/extensions"
            ''}
          ''

The problem is that you can’t use more than one extension dir
https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/3884

gilescope · August 2, 2021, 8:39am

I just want to say that coming back from a year or two off, nixos seems to have solved this extension contention problem nicely. Very impressed.