Okay, so this question was upvoted today, which brought it back to my attention. I decided to bite the bullet this time and dug into the nuts and bolts of VSCode's files and found where this history is stored.
TLDR
Modifying the history is doable (obviously, because it has to be stored somewhere), but it's not very practical at all. Unfortunately it will continue to be very difficult, until VSCode implements official support (which may be never). I recommend using the following method ONLY IF you absolutely need a history entry deleted.
The method
Note:
- I'm using Code OSS (the debranded build of VSCode) on Linux. The method should be applicable to other OSes, but the specific commands and paths will be different.
- This method works on VSCode 1.74.2, the latest version as of 2023-01-04. It may or may not work with future versions.
0. Exit VSCode completely
Obviously.
Check with your resource/task/process manager to make sure VSCode is completely killed. If you're not sure, just reboot.
1. Locate lastSyncglobalState.json
This file contains the command palette history data. On Linux it's located at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/Code - OSS/User/sync/globalState/lastSyncglobalState.json. On Windows it's probably under a similar path in %APPDATA%. Not sure about MacOS. Copy this file to somewhere convenient.
If you are curious how I discovered this file, I did a search of a command I recently ran using rg in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/Code - OSS/. Note that you have to search the "programmatic name" of the command, not its display name (e.g. rust-analyzer.reload, not rust-analyzer: Restart server).
2. Extract the relevant data
If you open up lastSyncglobalState.json with a text editor directly, you'll find a Russian doll of escaped JSON. Technically you can do the modification straight from here, but I'm not eating this .
Fortunately jq makes this somewhat easier:
# This is Bash but I think it works on Windows CMD too? Not sure.
jq '.syncData.content | fromjson.storage."commandPalette.mru.cache".value | fromjson.entries' lastSyncglobalState.json > history.json
The extracted history.json should look something like this:
[
{
"key": "rust-analyzer.debug",
"value": 297
},
{
"key": "rust-analyzer.syntaxTree",
"value": 298
},
// more entries...
]
3. Modify
Copy history.json to history-new.json, and simply remove the entries you want to delete from history-new.json. Do not modify history.json; we will need it in a bit.
Check that it's still valid JSON after your edits; in particular make sure that you have not left a trailing comma in the array.
4. Write back
The responsible way to do this is to perform the inverse of step 2, starting from the bottom up, update a field, json-encode, then update the field one level up, json-encode again, etc, until we get to the top level. But that's an enormous pain in the arse to do with jq.
Much easier I think, simply double (triple?) json-encode history-new.json, and perform a textual replacement. This is where the original history.json comes in handy:
# In lastSyncglobalState.json, replace the output of...
jq 'tojson | tojson' history.json
# with the output of...
jq 'tojson | tojson' history-new.json
Note that since the output of jq is quoted, it's necessary to remove the outmost layer of quotes (") on both the search string and the replace string. With rg we can automate this:
jq 'tojson | tojson' history.json | rg '^"(.+)"$' -r '$1'
jq 'tojson | tojson' history-new.json | rg '^"(.+)"$' -r '$1'
Of course there's nothing wrong with doing it manually, or with using sed instead if you want to. Again, just be careful you're not creating invalid JSON.
5. Copy back into VSCode directory
Honestly, you probably want to make a backup of the entire $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/Code - OSS/ directory (or whatever it is on your machine) before doing this. It's probably big I know, but I'm not sure what crazy thing VSCode will do if it finds lastSyncglobalState.json unparseable. Better be safe than sorry.
After you've done that, just copy your modified lastSyncglobalState.json back into $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/Code - OSS/User/sync/globalState/lastSyncglobalState.json and voila.
