I’ve been setting up a new OS X installation and wanted to quickly get Visual Studio Code set back up. Atom has a really handy command line utility, apm, that lets you do useful things like export a list of extensions and reinstall them elsewhere by passing in that list as a command line argument.

Unfortunately, while Visual Studio Code’s command line utility allows you to get a list of extensions with code --list-extensions which you can pipe into a text file, it doesn’t appear to have any way to automatically install the extensions to that file.

Fortunately, a minute with Google and Stack Overflow turns up this very helpful answer to run a command for each line in a text file. From there, some quick trial and error got me to this:

while read in; do code --install-extension "$in"; done < ~/vscode-extensions.txt

Not quite as convenient as Atom’s solution, but a nice way to make sure you don’t overlook anything.