Dedicated VSCode config for PlatformIO

One thing I don’t like about PlatformIO: it’s quite bloaty.

And that’s alright because this is a tradeoff for the conveniences you get, but I really only want the extension running when I work on some code that I want to build/flash/debug etc.

Today I found a nice solution to this problem: you can start a completely separated Visual Studio Code instance, that you can dedicate to PlatformIO (or any other set of extensions/themes/settings/etc, really).

$ code --help
...
  --user-data-dir <dir>             Specifies the directory that user
                                    data is kept in. Can be used to
                                    open multiple distinct instances
                                    of Code.
...
 --extensions-dir <dir>             Set the root path for extensions.

So I created some nice desktop integrated shortcuts to make this convenient to launch. It seems vscode goes ahead and creates the directories you specify, I just use user-data and ext-data in a directory called platformio-vscode in my home directory. Obviously you have to adjust the filesystem paths in case you copy some of my config down below.

Linux

I installed vscode via snap so I basically copied /var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/code_code.desktop, changed it a little bit and put it into ~/.local/share/applications/. I also like to add icons for these, so I downloaded the PlatformIO logo as a png file into ~/.icons/.

(link to PlatformIO png logo)

note: the .desktop files need to be set executable - chmod +x will do the trick

You could slim down this file much more but this works for me:

[Desktop Entry]
X-SnapInstanceName=code-platformio
Name=PlatformIO
Comment=PlatformIO with VSCode
GenericName=Text Editor
Exec=env BAMF_DESKTOP_FILE_HINT=/home/dena/.local/share/applications/platformio.desktop /snap/bin/code --force-user-env --user-data-dir /home/dena/platformio-vscode/user-data --extensions-dir /home/dena/platformio-vscode/ext-data %F
Icon=platformio.png
Type=Application
StartupNotify=false
StartupWMClass=PlatformIO
Categories=TextEditor;Development;IDE;
MimeType=application/x-code-workspace;
Keywords=vscode;platformio;

Windows

• search for “vscode” in start menu, right-click the link and choose “Open file location”
• copy the Visual Studio Code.lnk shortcut file
• right-click the copy, open Properties and add the command line options in the Target section:

"C:\Users\dena\AppData\Local\Programs\Microsoft VS Code\Code.exe" --user-data-dir C:\Users\dena\platformio-vscode\user-data --extensions-dir C:\Users\dena\platformio-vscode\ext-data

(link to PlatformIO .ico logo)