VS Code: Uninstall completely

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Nothing has to last forever, and VS Code might not be the right thing for everyone. VS Code can go overboard with all the extensions and things it had proposed to install. Up to a point that one needs to get re-started again. Or because you tasted VS Code, but you did not like it.

That’s OK, you can uninstall it, after you have installed it (see VS Code: IDE Installation). The catch is: the uninstall does not a full removal, as settings and extensions do not get removed.

This article shows how to fully uninstall VS Code.

To uninstall the program, follow the steps described by Microsoft in https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/setup/uninstall.

On Windows, this means to go to the Add or Remove Programs and removing Visual Studio Code:

VS Code Uninstallation

Another way is to run the uninstaller from the location, where VS Code is installed:

uninstall of VS Code

But this does not leave a ‘clean’ state. If you just run the ‘uinstall’ and an ‘install’ again, you will notice that all your settings and extensions still exist.

💡 To separate things, you might consider a Docker environment.

To remove the settings, delete the following folder (Windows path as example):

%UserFolder%\AppData\Roaming\Code

Check as well the ‘Local’ one:

%UserFolder%\AppData\Local\Code

To remove all the extensions and other files, additionally delete the following folder too:

%UserFolder%\.vscode
VS Code extensions folder

Depending on your installation method, check and clean your PATH variable too.

💡 This does not remove extra files and folders created by VS Code extensions. Things like vcpkg store their files in extra directories.

Congratulations! With this, you have a clean state again. Plus you have got back some previous disk space too. I wish Microsoft would offer a way to fully uninstall VS Code. Until then, I have to manually delete the extra VS Code folders.

Need to install VS Code again? Then see VS Code: Installation.

Or you need to get started, then see VS Code: Getting Started, literally.

Happy uninstalling 🙂

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