Home / ubuntu / Questions / 1526888
Accepted
user
Asked: 2024-09-15 22:42:18 +0800 CST

Remove VS Code in WSL

  • 772

After typing code . in WSL running Ubuntu 24.04, VS Code automatically installed itself. I am now trying to uninstall it, but cannot find it anywhere. sudo apt purge code, sudo apt-get purge code, sudo dpkg --purge code, and sudo snap remove --purge code all tell me that code was not installed. The same holds for alternative names, incl. vscode and visual-studio-code. When I enter code ., VS Code opens though. It clearly is installed.

I want to keep the Windows version of VS Code, but remove its Linux installation. Do you know how I can do that?

Edit:

To clarify questions in the comments:

  1. I have simply entered code ., nothing else. Unexpectedly, that was enough to trigger an installation. This behavior might be specific to WSL.
  2. snap list tells me that no snaps are installed. Anything installed with sudo snap install --classic should show up there.
24.04

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    What you likely saw, when you typed code . for the first time in WSL, was the installation of the "server" shim that VSCode uses to communicate with WSL:

    > code .
Installing VS Code Server for Linux x64 (4849ca9bdf9666755eb463db297b69e5385090e3)
Downloading: 100%
Unpacking: 100%
Unpacked 1765 files and folders to /home/ntd/.vscode-server/bin/4849ca9bdf9666755eb463db297b69e5385090e3.
Looking for compatibility check script at /home/ntd/.vscode-server/bin/4849ca9bdf9666755eb463db297b69e5385090e3/bin/helpers/check-requirements.sh
Running compatibility check script
Compatibility check successful (0)

    As you can see from the output above, this is stored in a hidden (dot-prefixed) .vscode-server directory under your home directory.

    If you don't plan on using VSCode from within Ubuntu/WSL, you can simple remove it via:

    rm -rf ~/.vscode-server

    Running code again will simply regenerate it if needed. You may need to reinstall any extensions you added to the "Remote: WSL" session.

    • 1