When in Windows, do as Windows does aka store settings/extensions in %APPDATA% or %LOCALAPPDATA% #7035
Description
- VSCode Version: 1.1.1
- OS Version: 10
Steps to Reproduce:
- Install VS Code.
- Install one or more extensions.
- Notice that there is a
.vscodefolder in your user directory.
In Windows, the root of the user directory is NOT the right place to store application settings. This is a very common convention in Linux but Windows != Linux and not all Windows users want to pretend they are running Linux. In windows the correct location for application settings is %APPDATA% and the correct location for extensions is %LOCALAPPDATA% or %PROGRAMDATA% (depending on level of security consciousness).
To avoid a flame war, I want to be clear that this issue isn't debating why C:/Users/<username>/.<appname> is the wrong place for these files, it is only asserting that Microsoft has very clearly documented the right place for settings files and VSCode does not follow it. If the authors of VSCode have consciously decided to go against the long-running convention established by the OS authors then I won't press on the issue (though I think that would be a silly decision for VSCode). I am submitting this issue under the assumption that the authors didn't realize there was an established convention (very common in open source projects) and did what was familiar to them.