Explore user profiles

Overview

This issue aims to explore what adding “profiles” could look like in the product. These profiles can be used in education, presentations, or can even be language specific. The explorations should cover being able to setup and switch between profiles. Ideally these profiles should be synced with Settings Sync (if used) so you can use those profiles anywhere.

One idea for settings is to introduce a new settings object like:

{
    "profiles": {
        "demos": {
            "files.autoSave": "onFocusChange",
            "editor.fontSize": 18,
            "editor.tabSize": 2,
            "editor.fontWeight": "600",
            "screencastMode.enabled": true,
        }
    },
    
    "editor.fontFamily": "Cascadia Code",
    "editor.renderWhitespace": "all",
}

The “Demos” profile inherits the current settings a user has and adds additional settings on top of the current ones. Also, when profiles are enabled we will create a “Default” profile where the user can switch back to their default mode.

Related issues

• Screencast Mode only settings #105226
• Sync mutliple settings profiles #92393
• Multiple environment profiles (either per-session or per-window) #57548
• User profile #53453
• Enable/disable extensions from config file #40239
• Local Workspace settings #40233
• Support “perspectives” like approach in VSCode #95182

[miguelsolorio]

Concept B

This concepts attempts to re-use the accounts menu in the activity bar and also creates a default profile and reduces the effort involved with creating/switching accounts.

[sandy081]

We are planning to support syncing profiles in current (September 2022) milestone - https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/154243