one thing to make vscode more lighter and more zen is to reduce the amount of installed extensions or themes.
but for people like me who code in many languages, in each language, i usually install one or two extensions to improve syntax highlighting and ide completion. the result is: there are dozens of extensions installed, but only a few are usable and helpful at one moment.
instead of disabling them one by one, which is a cumbersome task, i finally found an extension to rule them all.
introducing: vscode profiles by @evald24
with this extension, you can group multiple extensions by creating a profile, then applying it so that only selected extensions are enabled, while rest that are not listed inside the profile got disabled.
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hope this helps.