How to exclude file extensions and languages from “format on save” in VSCode?

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You can use language specific settings to enable it for a specific language only, e.g. JavaScript:

"[javascript]": {
    "editor.formatOnSave": true
}

To disable it for a specific language, you could switch the global default to true and combine it with a language-specific false:

"editor.formatOnSave": true
"[javascript]": {
    "editor.formatOnSave": false
}

Note that language specific settings are based on language identifiers rather than directly on file extensions. There’s an open feature request to allow for file extension specific settings as well.

In cases where the language ID isn’t specific enough, "files.associations" could be used to remap files with a specific extension and/or in a specific directory to another ID, but this will affect syntax highlighting, code completion, etc. as well. For instance, this would work to disable formatting for JavaScript files in out directories, but they will be treated as plaintext:

"[javascript]": {
    "editor.formatOnSave": true
},
"files.associations": {
    "**/out/**/*.js": "plaintext"
}

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