How to Turn Off Syntax Highlighting for a Single File in VSCode

Ever open a file in VSCode and get annoyed by all of its highlights of your code, or find that it has mis-identified the content? Sometimes it’s just easier to turn off the language highlighting in Visual Studio Code. It’s simple:

First, open the file in VSCode.

Then, at the bottom bar, you’ll see all the configuration options and information. Move past the line count, spaces and encoding. There will be an option that displays what file type VSCode thinks this file is.

Click that. It will prompt you with a choice to make other associations. Ignore all of that and scroll to and click Plain Text.

There you go! Now it’s just plain text formatting for the duration of the time it’s opened. When you re-open it again, it’ll be back to normal.