Skip to content

VS Code: use language-specific settings

With VS Code you have the ability to customize your spaces vs tabs preference, like in any editor, and also the option to choose how many spaces should a tab take.

Different languages however might require different settings.

For example I like to have 4 spaces in HTML, but only 2 in CSS and JavaScript.

Go on the other hand wants 8 spaces.

How to deal with this?

You can add language-specific settings into the VS Code preferences file (opened with cmd+,).

This is an example that uses different settings for JS, CSS, HTML and Go files:

"[javascript]": {
    "editor.insertSpaces": true,
    "editor.tabSize": 2
},
"[css]": {
    "editor.insertSpaces": true,
    "editor.tabSize": 2
},
"[html]": {
    "editor.insertSpaces": true,
    "editor.tabSize": 4
},
"[go]": {
    "editor.insertSpaces": false,
    "editor.tabSize": 8
}

I wrote 17 books to help you become a better developer, download them all at $0 cost by joining my newsletter

JOIN MY CODING BOOTCAMP, an amazing cohort course that will be a huge step up in your coding career - covering React, Next.js - next edition February 2025

Bootcamp 2025

Join the waiting list