VSCode Improvements

For some reason some software companies like to improve their software to near the point it becomes useless. The bigger the company the more this seems to happen. Many years ago, when hand crafting HTML was a big thing, I found a simple HTML editor that I really liked. Unfortunately, the subsequent improvements rendered it near useless to me and I ended up looking elsewhere.

Sadly, I’m starting to wonder if VS Code is heading the same way. It seems to be getting so many new features that it’s hard to get at what you want. This happened recently when the merge editor was changed to a 3-way diff viewer. The most unfortunate aspect of this was that we had no say in it, it was just imposed on us. Yes, it can be turned off, but we all know how disruptive that sort of thing can be to our flow. If we had a chance to say, I’ll look at this when I have time then I’m sure more people would be a lot happier. Personally, I don’t really like 3-way merging, I really like the way that VS Code did it originally and so I wanted to turn it off.

Unfortunately, this resulted in another issue that had otherwise gone unnoticed by me. I found the setting I needed online —

"git.mergeEditor": false

I haven’t changed any settings for a while — I suspect like many that they are things that aren’t changed often so I need to look up how to do it. I looked on the normal settings but couldn’t find anything for this so wanted to look at the Settings.json. This is where I came across an improvement which meant that using the search, I couldn’t find a way to access the settings.json, I was surprised and a little irritated by this as it seemed to be another improvement. Eventually, I discovered that I could access the file by using an obscure little icon on the top right of the settings page

This brought to light a further improvement which is that only a few settings now show, specifically the user settings. I appreciate that in some ways this makes it easier but if I want to change them I need to either scour the settings page and hope i get it right or scour the web to find out how to access the full settings.json which is frustrating as the results usually return the old way.

I think in summary, I will probably continue to use Code for a while but I will also be looking at alternatives, NotePad++ being the main one. If, however, new features had to be turned on it might be different but of course that implies that not everyone wants them Shock Horror!