It used to be straightforward to disable languages for Prettier in VSCode. You just added a prettier.disableLanguages setting and you were done.

// In settings.json
[
  "prettier.disableLanguages": [
    "javascript",
    "javascriptreact",
    "json",
    "markdown"
  ],
]

Unfortunately, prettier.disableLanguages is deprecated so we can’t do this anymore. Here’s what we can do instead.

There are two methods.

1. Enable Prettier in specific languages.
2. Enable Prettier globally but disable it in specific languages.

Enabling Prettier in specific languages

The first option is to enable Prettier for specific languages you use. You can do this with the editor.defaultFormatter property. Here's an example where you enable it for CSS.

[
  "[css]": {
    "editor.defaultFormatter": "esbenp.prettier-vscode"
  }
]

If you use this method, you need to enable Prettier for every language, which can be tedious.

[
  "[html]": {
    "editor.defaultFormatter": "esbenp.prettier-vscode"
  },
  "[css]": {
    "editor.defaultFormatter": "esbenp.prettier-vscode"
  },
  "[scss]": {
    "editor.defaultFormatter": "esbenp.prettier-vscode"
  }
]

So I prefer to enable Prettier globally, but overwrite Prettier in specific languages.

Enabling Prettier Globally but disabling it in specific languages

We can enable Prettier globally with the editor.defaultFormatter property.

"editor.defaultFormatter": "esbenp.prettier-vscode",

If you want to disable Prettier for a specific language, you can set the editor.defaultFormatter to null.

"editor.defaultFormatter": null;

You can also choose to overwrite a specific formatter for a specific language. In the following example, I use Standard JS instead of Prettier for formatting JavaScript.

Note:
If you're using Standard for JavaScript, it's much easier to use the prettier-vscode-standard extension instead. I wrote about this in another article.

"[javascript]": {
    "editor.defaultFormatter": "chenxsan.vscode-standardjs"
},

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