An optimal environment is personalized with both individual preferences like colors and themes, custom tabs, keyboard shortcuts, and extensions, as well as team preferences like debugger and git settings. Today, we hear about many barriers and pain points to applying settings from developers like you. We\u2019ve learned that this leads to many options never being used or even discovered. Below, we\u2019ll discuss the challenges with today\u2019s Tools Options and how we\u2019re improving that experience with Unified Settings.<\/p>\n Today, each page in Tools Options has its own UI. This results in Tools Options:<\/p>\n With Unified Settings, we aim to improve the overall experience by enabling each settings page to respect your theme and offer consistent UI controls that adjust to your monitor resolution.<\/p>\n When you change a setting in Tools Options today, you\u2019ll typically change the behavior for that specific Visual Studio installation. Sometimes, however, you\u2019ll want to control settings around coding conventions, and those are best applied to specific repositories. Many teams use folder-scoped settings, which include .editorconfig and .gitconfig files, but these don\u2019t modify Visual Studio settings.<\/p>\n We\u2019re introducing \u201cscopes\u201d to Unified Settings to bring you more flexibility and control over your environment. Scopes describe the layers of settings which work together to configure your environment based on your context, and any setting may be controlled at either scope.<\/p>\n Visual Studio will offer the following scopes to begin with, where the later scopes override earlier scopes:<\/p>\n Note that industry-standard folder-scoped settings like .editorconfig, .gitconfig, and .nugetconfig, will still be supported and respected by Visual Studio.<\/span><\/td>\n Today, it\u2019s impossible to control which settings sync between different Visual Studio installations and because you can\u2019t export a complete list of settings, when you\u2019re configuring a new installation, you still need to manually update setting that wasn\u2019t sync\u2019d.<\/p>\n With Unified Settings, we\u2019ll make it easier and faster for you to share and export all your Visual Studio settings. Unified Settings are stored in a human-readable JSON file, so you can share settings with a teammate or manually edit settings values. You\u2019ll also be able to choose to sync all or some settings.<\/p>\n![\"Unified](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2023\/05\/UnifiedSettingsMockup.png\")
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Consistency and Applicability<\/h2>\n
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Scoping<\/h2>\n
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\n Scope<\/strong><\/td>\n Description<\/strong><\/td>\n Typical examples<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n User Scope<\/td>\n Applies to all projects and solutions for a given Visual Studio installation.<\/td>\n Generally include personal settings like theme, fonts and colors, and debugging settings.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Workspace scope<\/td>\n Applies to a specific project or repository. You may choose to commit these to the repository so everyone on a team can have the same settings or keep these private as your own repository settings. If you have a custom theme for a specific project, for example, you might not want to share this in the repository.<\/p>\n Might include special debugging preferences, custom tab appearance.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n Sharing and syncing settings<\/h2>\n
![\"Unified](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2023\/05\/05-18-2023_UnifiedSettingSearchComparisonSMALL10.gif\")
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