There are many of us who find it bad practice that VSCode creates a ~/.vscode/ folder instead of following the common XDG base directory structure, respected by a wide variety of programs. This issue has come up regularly, without a good permanent solution:

• Revisit VS Code folder structure for app data, settings, extensions #3884
• Not possible to define location of argv.json #84808
• Unified "--portable-dir <dir>" command line flag #100988
• Have a setting for the extensions folder location #17691
• Cache files not stored under appropriate XDG directory #126182

I would like to propose the following new behaviour:

1. If ~/.config/vscode/argv.json¹ is present at launch in non-portable mode, then VSCode uses this as the path for argv.json.
2. argv.json supports setting the following arguments, which the user can set to XDG-compatible paths if they like:

• user-data-dir
• extensions-dir

As far as I can tell, this would be sufficient to avoid creating a ~/.vscode/ folder. It also reuses the existing structure of VSCode to do this without introducing significant hacks, edge cases, or race conditions.

Part 1 seems reasonably feasible to me, given that argv.json is hardcoded in delightfully few places at the moment: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/search?q=%22argv.json%22&type=code

Part 2 would essentially involve adding those arguments to SUPPORTED_ELECTRON_SWITCHES.

I'd be happy to submit a PR if this kind of approach is amenable to the maintainers.