Opening Your User Settings

00:00 In VS Code, you can find your settings either by clicking the menu bar or by using the command palette or by using your user profile icon. That’s what we’ll do now.

00:10 So when you click the smiley icon of the Playground profile that you just created, you can see that there is the Settings menu.

00:17 Once you click the settings menu item, then the settings open, and that’s VS Code’s user interface to edit settings. That’s a cool way of getting to know the settings because there are additional descriptions.

00:32 One way of thinking about this user interface for your settings is like a documentation because like I said, there is an explanation for most of your settings right there.

00:43 If you want to get proper documentation, then you can head over to the Visual Studio Code website where you have a Getting Started Guide and there you also get an introduction to the settings in VS Code.

00:55 If you are curious about all the settings you can set, you actually have to read through the documentation and depending on which topic you’re reading about, there might be settings attached to it.

01:06 So generally I like it more to browse and search through the settings user interface in VS Code.

01:14 When you’re editing the settings, you can do this in this user interface as well we’ll come back to this in a moment. But generally you will use the settings.json file that’s attached to your user settings and you can find the settings.json file by clicking this little document icon with the arrow on the upper right.

01:36 Since you didn’t adjust any user settings for you this settings.json file is empty right now, and if you are there for the first time, it’s a little bit confusing what to actually write there.

01:48 So that’s where the settings user interface comes in handy. Again, to show you something about it, I moved the settings.json file to the right and now on the left there is the settings user interface and to show you how the settings user interface and the settings.json file play together, you can just go in anywhere in the settings user interface.

02:11 So there is, for example, like the commonly used page at the beginning, but on the left side you see a bunch of stuff you can edit for a Text Editor, Workbench, Window, etc.

02:21 But for now, let’s for example, change the font size to a bigger font size, and once you change this font size setting and hit Enter, then you can see on the right side in the settings.json file that there is now a property Editor Font Size 14.

02:40 Once you change the setting back to the default setting and hit Enter, then you can see on the right side again that the settings.json file is empty.

02:50 The reason for this is that if you use the default settings from VS Code, so there are no adjustments there, there is no need to save it in your user setting file, right, because you’re just using the default stuff.

03:02 But if you want to edit something, then it’ll be added to the settings.json file.

03:08 In the next lessons, you will do this by hand so I will tell you what the properties are and you can try them out. But if you are curious at some point, just open up your settings and then see how the settings.json file changes if you do changes in the user interface.