How can I manually edit the list of recently opened files in VS Code?

I rely heavily on the File: Open Recent… command to open frequently used files, but yesterday my local Google Drive folder got moved to a new location and now I can no longer access any of the files in that folder through the Open Recent panel because the paths don't match.

The fix would be as simple as replacing "/Google Drive/" with "/Google Drive/My Drive/" but I have no idea what file contains the list of files that appears in the recently opened panel.

I'm assuming it's somewhere in ~/Library/Application Support/Code but not sure where.

Solution

I was wondering the same thing the other day and found this while searching for a solution, so I took some time to investigate it today.
It's been a a few weeks since you posted, so hopefully this will still be of help to you.

Location of settings

Those setting are stored in the following files:

Windows: %APPDATA%\Code\User\globalStorage\state.vscdb
MacOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Code/User/globalStorage/state.vscdb
Linux: ~/.config/Code/User/globalStorage/state.vscdb

If your software is cross-platform, you may want to consider using a library such as Python's platformdirs to determine the path.

The file is an sqlite3 database, which is used as a key-value store. It has a single table named ItemTable and the relevant key is history.recentlyOpenedPathsList.

The value has the following structure:

{
  "entries": [
    {
      // Only one of these two will be present, depending on whether
      // the history entry is a folder or file
      "folderUri": "path:///path/to/folder",
      "fileUri": "path:///path/to/file",
      // These properties may not exist on all entries
      "label": "...",
      "remoteAuthority": "..."
    }
  ]
}

To view the current list, you can run the following command:

sqlite3 -readonly "$VSCODE_STATE_PATH" "SELECT [value] FROM ItemTable WHERE [key] = 'history.recentlyOpenedPathsList'" | jq

Modifying the settings

Specifically, I was interested in changing the way it's displayed (the label), so I'll detail how I did that, but it should be just as easy to update the path.

Here's the Python code I used to make those edits:

import json, sqlite3, platformdirs
from typing import TypedDict, NotRequired


class VsCodeHistoryEntry(TypedDict):
    folderUri: NotRequired[str]
    fileUri: NotRequired[str]
    label: NotRequired[str]
    remoteAuthority: NotRequired[str]


vscode_state_path = (
    platformdirs.user_config_path() 
    / "Code/User/globalStorage/state.vscdb"
)

# Open the db, get the value and parse it
db = sqlite3.connect(vscode_state_path)
history_raw = db.execute("SELECT [value] FROM ItemTable WHERE  [key] = 'history.recentlyOpenedPathsList'").fetchone()[0]
history: list[VsCodeHistoryEntry] = json.loads(history_raw)["entries"]

# Make the changes you'd like
# ...

# Stringify and update
history_raw = json.dumps({"entries": history})
# ? used as placeholder to avoid accidental SQL injection
db.execute(
    "UPDATE ItemTable SET [value] = ? WHERE key = 'history.recentlyOpenedPathsList'",
    (history_raw,),
)
db.commit()
db.close()

Code references

For reference (mostly for my future self), here are the relevant source code areas:

The settings are read here.
The File->Open Recent uses those values as-is (see here).
However when using the Get Started page, the Recents area is populated here. In the Get Started, the label is presented in a slightly different way:
vscode snapshot
The folder name is the link, and the parent folder is the the text beside it.
This is done by the splitName method.

Notes

Before messing around with the settings file, it would be wise to back it up.
If a VS Code instance is running, the changes will not take effect, as VS Code will simply over-write the database on exit.
Keep in mind that there might be some state saved by other extensions, so if anything weird happens, blame it on that.
For reference, I'm using vscode 1.74.2 (note: editor tested and updated for v1.97.2).

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