Improving the VS Code settings experience

We shipped the Alpha of VS Code in April of 2015 (time fly's :) since that point we have evolved the product considerably adding many requested features and enhancements - some of the big ones include Tabs, MiniMap, the Terminal, Workbench theming, Extensions, ... and we have more planned (roadmap).

With this evolution we have also evolved the scope of our settings - our json files offer a very powerful, transparent and editor friendly way to work with settings. This is something we MUST preserve - at the same time there is a large group of our users who:

1. miss a number of our core features - often requesting we add them
2. struggle to work with the json files and would love a simplified experience [as an example Provide GUI for settings #3355]

We know this is true from our usability studies, our user feedback surveys, or direct customer interactions [in GitHub Issues, Twitter, User Voice and more] so this continues to be an area for us to continue to focus on.

A journey to improve settings

NOTE: These are investigations and for now we make no commitment to act on any of them - some will work out, some will prove challenging and some will be bad ideas. We also may not work through the lust in the order presented.

As a result I'm proposing a few things we can investigate to improve settings. Some of this we started a while back so I think of this as a multi stage proposal to improve the experience, the investigations will include (but not be limited to).

• Enhance the settings experience in VS Code (shipped)
• Enhance the keybinding experience in VS Code (shipped)
• 🏃‍♂️ Improve defaults i.e. enable some of our key features causing frustration out of the box (under discussion)
• 🏃‍♂️ Improve comments/tips in settings json file e.g. ensure we have good examples for complex names
• Change settings in context e.g. disable mini-map, or code lens with a right click
• Simplified experience for most common settings i.e. provide a simple UI as a complement to the json files
• Surface extension settings w/ Extension details i.e. not only list settings contributions for an extension but let you manage them in context
• Make is simpler to edit language over-rides e.g. for markdown or typescript