Visceral

VIsual Studio CodE woRkspAce cLeanup

Motivation

During the backup of my user profile directory of my Windows machine I discovered that this directory has a size of more than 35 GB. This was somehow shocking for me. What in heavens sake is wasting so much space? After some analysis I figured out that the directory

C:\Users\<OSUserName>\AppData\Roaming\Code\User\workspaceStorage

contains nearly almost all data. Caused by my heavy use of VSCode I have got a lot of rubbish in the mentioned directory. A quick search on the internet shows that this seems to be a common problem:

• VSCode Issue 39692
• VSCode Issue 56993

Especially in case you're using the C++ extension like me. You can enable VSCode to write the data to your workspace directory. From my point of view this is a kind of pollution which I don't feel happy with. Anyway, if you want to do so, you have to use the following settings in the setup of your VSCode:

"C_Cpp.default.browse.databaseFilename": "${workspaceFolder}/.vscode/vc.db"

My solution

I will use VSCode without much special settings. So VSCode stores the workspace information in the path mentioned above. I've wrote this extension for VSCode to cleanup the workspace:

• Check the workspace - for each folder found
  • Check if folder exists
  • If not, skip
  • Check if a file named workspace.json exist in this folder
  • If not, skip
  • Read the content of workspace.json
  • Check if a key folder exist
  • If not, skip
  • Check if folder exists in filesystem
  • If not, mark workspace for deletion
  • Check if folder was already processed
  • If not, memorize folder
  • If already, mark workspace for deletion
• Delete all marked folders from workspace

To think about

It might be possible on heavy use of VSCode that nested folder structures exists in the workspace folders. At the moment this is not regarded because of a clear idea how to solve this.

There is the following scenarios:

...\workspaceStorage\b132868eb8300749d50b8098566e9ade\workspace.json
{
  "folder": "file:///d%3A/Workspaces/GitHub/Visceral"
}

...\workspaceStorage\2948453b9749ec2d0e62a599b21110ac\workspace.json
{
  "folder": "file:///d%3A/Workspaces/GitHub/Visceral/src"
}

Both are valid workspaces. Each workspace got it's individual workspace storage. But what is the difference between the parent settings and the child settings? The basic asumption is that because of the parent child structure the parent is the major workspace and the workspace of the child is deletable. In case this is the way to go a little bit more logic has to be implemented.