Reset or Remove VS Code Without Losing Your Setup

Dragging Visual Studio Code to the Trash removes the editor and none of your setup. That is deliberate, documented, and the reason most people find VS Code exactly as they left it after a reinstall they hoped would fix something.

If you are uninstalling to start clean, the app is the part that does not matter.

Your setup lives in two directories

VS Code keeps user state outside the application bundle:

~/Library/Application Support/Code
~/.vscode

The first holds settings, keybindings, workspace state, and the backing store for anything an extension saved. The second holds the extensions themselves.

The documentation is explicit about what removing them does: it returns you to the state before you installed VS Code, and resets all settings. That is the correct description of a factory reset, and the wrong outcome if you were only trying to fix a stuck window.

Decide which outcome you want first

Three different jobs get called uninstalling, and they need different amounts of deleting.

Reinstall to fix a broken build: remove the app only. Everything comes back. If the problem was in your settings or an extension, this achieves nothing, which is the usual outcome.

Start from a clean editor: remove the app and both directories. Export your settings first if you want any of them back.

Free space: remove neither. The space is almost always in per-project caches rather than in the editor, and there is a separate article for that.

Sync makes the decision for you

If Settings Sync is on and signed into a GitHub or Microsoft account, your settings, keybindings, snippets, and extension list are stored in that account. Deleting both directories is then safe: signing in on a fresh install restores them.

If Settings Sync is off, the two directories are the only record. A settings.json tuned over two years is a file you wrote, not a cache, and nothing else has a copy.

Check before deleting. It is in the account menu at the bottom of the activity bar, and it takes longer to read this sentence than to look.

Export the extension list even if you delete everything

code --list-extensions > ~/Desktop/vscode-extensions.txt

This works while VS Code is still installed and turns rebuilding into a loop rather than an act of memory. If the code command is not on your path, VS Code installs it from the command palette under Shell Command.

The command line tool and the leftovers

Removing the app leaves the code shell command pointing into a bundle that no longer exists, along with the usual caches, logs, and saved application state. Those are disposable in every case.

Per-project artifacts are not part of this at all. A .vscode folder inside a repository belongs to that project and travels with it in version control; removing the editor should not touch it.

Seeing the size before deciding

The two state directories grow quietly. Extension hosts cache language servers, and a few extensions keep indexes that reach into the gigabytes, which is usually the real answer to why the editor's footprint is larger than the editor.

Mole shows both directories with their sizes alongside the app, so the difference between an extension cache worth clearing and a settings directory worth keeping is visible before anything moves. Removals land in the Trash, which is the right place for a directory you might discover you wanted an hour later.

What Settings Sync carries, and what it does not

It carries settings, keyboard shortcuts, user snippets, the extension list, and some UI state. Sign into the same account on another machine and those return on their own.

It does not carry workspace-level state, or the data extensions write to disk. A .vscode/settings.json inside a repository travels with that repository and is none of its business, and extension indexes, language server caches and sign-in state do not follow either, so a reinstalled extension may still need setting up again.

The account menu at the bottom of the activity bar shows the current state. If it says you are signed in and shows a sync time, those two directories are safe to delete. If it says you are not, they are the only copy.