Upgrading Portable Visual Studio Code

The background

I have been using vscode on Ubuntu/Windows¹ as my primary text editor for quite a time. When “installing” vscode, I usually download the tar.gz and add a shortcut in gnome dock on my own. This method brings portability to the application. However, for all data to be contained² within the vscode directory, we need to create a new directory named data in the same location where the binary reside.

Upgrading the version

When a new vscode version is released, and I need to upgrade, the process would be as follows.

1. Download the tar.gz of new version.
2. Close all vscode windows.
3. Backup the current vscode directory.
4. Copy the data directory from backup to the extracted directory.

With above, all customizations will be copied from the previous to the new, leaving next to nothing to reconfigure.