If, like us authors, you are working on different hosts, it can be painful to manage your entire tool belt and settings. Unfortunately, there is no login story planned as you can experience in the full-fledged Visual Studio, where you can log in to your developer account to synchronize your settings. Luckily, the VSCode community is very active, and a settings sync extension has been developed. This extension uses your GitHub account and creates a private gist (usually used for short code snippets) to store:

• All extensions
• User folder contents:
  • Settings file
  • Keybinding file
  • Launch file
  • Snippets folder
  • VSCode Extension settings
  • Workspaces folder

Your data is stored in the same JSON format that is used in your local settings files. Using the extension is very simple. After downloading the extension, you need to create a new GitHub token at https://github.com/settings/tokens/new that has the permission to create gists, as shown in the following screenshot:

Take good care of this access token! You will not be able to retrieve it again once it has been generated; you will have to reset the token to be able to see it again. Also, be aware that anyone in possession of your access token can, in this instance, create new gists in your context.

Once the extension is installed and you have your access token, you can simply press Alt + Shift + U, or type Sync in the command palette to start the initial upload. After the sync has finished, you will see your secret gist's GUID, which you can use on another system to import your settings:

To do this, simply press Alt + Shift + D, or again type Sync in the command palette to download your settings on another system. All of your settings will be applied, outstanding extensions will be added, and so on. Settings sync can also be configured to automatically download updated settings on startup or when a change is made.