10 essential VS Code tips & tricks for greater productivity

OpenConvo open in Visual Studio Code.

73%.

Did you know that 73% of developers worldwide depend on the same code editor?

Yes, the 2023 Stack Overflow Developer Survey results are in, and yet again, Visual Studio Code was by far the most used development environment.

“Visual Studio Code remains the preferred IDE across all developers, increasing its use among those learning to code compared to professional developers”, survey.stackoverflow.co/2023

And we all know why: it’s awesome.

But are we fully exploring its potential? In this article, we unfold some compelling VS Code features that enhance productivity with local source control, animated typing, and rapid line deletion, amongst others. Let us start using them to achieve our coding goals faster than ever.

1. Timeline view: local source control

The Timeline view gives us built-in source control.

Many of us know how useful Git and other source control tools are, helping us easily track file changes and revert back to a previous point when needed.

So the Timeline view in VS Code provides an automatically updated timeline of important events related to a file, such as Git commits, file saves, and test runs.

Expand this view to see a list of snapshot of events related to the current file. Here it’s file saves, but also Git commits where the file was staged.

Hover over the snapshot item to view the date and time when VS Code made the snapshot.

Select a snapshot item to see a diff view showing the changes between the file at the snapshot time and the file presently.