Spoiler: Its super easy.

    Somehow I never could figure out how to set a conda environment in VS code. So I always would just open a windows terminal, activate my environment and run my scripts from there. That was a pain in the ass to do.

    Turns out its super simple to just associate a conda enviroment in VScode. You press ctrl + shift + p and then select the appropriate conda enviroment from the list.

    Once set, we get an indication in VScode regarding the conda env thats currently activated.

    VScode indicator

    Interestingly, now when we open a new terminal in VScode we get this notification indicating that the conda env is activated in the terminal even though we dont see it as such.

    VScode notification

    Weird. Maybe its because a powershell terminal that opens up.

    One day suddenly mamba/conda stopped working via powershell. I dont know exactly what happened or changed but I think mamba automatically made some breaking changes. Not sure. But basically to activate an environment, the following commands run in powershell,

    C:/Users/<user_name>/mambaforge/Scripts/activate
conda activate <env_name>

    So if everything is properly configured then the first command activates the base env. But this wasnt happening and hence the second command gave an error saying "conda was not recognized".

    Analysis - On powershell, I directly tried to activate the env via

    C:\Users\<user_name>\mambaforge\Scripts\conda.exe activate <env_name>

    And BAM!!! It gave me an error saying that my shell was not configured properly for conda.

    Solution? I ran

    C:\Users\<user_name>\mambaforge\Scripts\conda.exe init powershell

    And that modified certain scripts and it all worked. Yay.