VS Code: Tips and Tricks

Improve your coding workflow on Visual Studio Code

Published in

Poatek

7 min readAug 17, 2023

In the fast-paced world of modern work, sometimes we try to make every second count. As the demands on our time continue to increase, the quest for efficiency has become an eternal pursuit. If you are a developer and like me, seeking to automate boring and repetitive tasks, Visual Studio Code might be the tool to improve your productivity, and if you already use it, here you can learn some time-saving features and techniques that might improve your workflow. Brace yourself, as we embark on a journey to unravel the time-saving wonders of VS Code, unveiling tips, tricks, and techniques that might improve your workflow.

A high degree of customization is available, along with an extensive list of free extensions. Learning some tricks on VS Code can substantially boost a programmer’s efficiency. If you are among the developers that use VS Code regularly in your day-to-day life, I hope this content may help you with some useful tips and tricks to optimize your work and extract the best from this amazing editor.

One of the most useful and convenient resources from VS Code are the shortcuts, and there are plenty of them that many developers don’t know, besides that you can even customize them on your own. By using them, you can be more efficient and save time from tasks that would require many clicks, such as editing multiple places at once, especially when you need to manipulate data files, e.g. CSV, JSON, XML, and SQL. Also, a portion of these key bindings are the same across different platforms and softwares. Besides that, shortcuts are much more helpful for those who like smaller keyboards. Here I’ll show you some of my favorites and most used key bindings that I already taught to colleagues.

Useful shortcuts

Here I would like to share with you some of my favorite and most used shortcuts:

Ctrl + Shift + P — Open Command Palette
Ctrl + P — Go to specific file searching by any string in its name
Ctrl + K + Ctrl + S — Open Keyboard Shortcuts 🤯
Ctrl + F — Find a text in the current file
Ctrl + Shift + F — Find a text in all files and you can filter by folders
Ctrl + H — Find and replace a text occurence in the current file
— In all find/search features you can use regex patterns by clicking on the icon ▪️*, or using the shortcut Alt + R
Ctrl + D — Select next occurrence of the text selected
— Combined with Ctrl + Left/Right and Ctrl + Home/End
Ctrl + Shift + L — Select all occurrences in the file of the selected text
Shift + Alt + I — After selecting multiple rows, the command will add one cursor at the end of each selected row
Press scroll and drag up/down — Adds multiple cursors along the lines
Alt + Click — Add an extra cursor in the position clicked
Alt + Up/Down — Move line up and down
Ctrl + Shift + U and Ctrl + Shift + L — After selecting a text or placing the cursor in a work, the command will make the text uppercase or lowercase
— For this one my suggestion is to update to use Ctrl + Up/Down arrows, as it is more intuitive
Ctrl + Page Up/Down — Change to next/previous tab
— Here I suggest to update to use Ctrl + Tab and Ctrl + Shift + Tab as it is more accessible using one hand, and it’s the same shortcut used in the browser
Alt + Z — Enable and disable word wrap
Ctrl + Shift + V — Paste plain text without formatting

Example of multiple selectors usage (Source: Author)

Useful extensions

I encourage you to take a look at the documentation of these packages, they have a pretty good overview of features and GIFs showing how they work.

Project Manager — Organize and easily switch between projects
Material Icon Theme — Support for a huge variety of icons for folder and file types
Git Graph — View a Git Graph of your repository, and perform Git actions from the graph (see the cover image)
Git History — View git log, file history, compare branches or commits
Prettier — Code formatter for a variety of languages, especially for web development
Dracula Official — A dark theme adopted by many developers
WSL — Open any folder in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
GitHub Copilot — For AI enthusiasts — the only paid plugin from this list — Copilot provides autocomplete-style suggestions from an AI pair programmer as you code

Project Manager exemplification. (Source: Alessandro Fragnani — Project Manager author [2])

Working with data files

During these years working with VS Code and more specifically manipulating data files such as CSV, JSON, XML, and even SQL scripts — everything that has a pattern in its structure — I already faced some issues that VS Code helped handle and later allowed me to help my colleagues with their issues. Here I’ll share some of these tricks dividing them into topics:

Find and replace using regex is a powerful resource. Simple patterns are very helpful and save a lot of time if you need to update strings with specific patterns. Besides that, these patterns can also help later with your code when manipulating texts.
— In the example below, the aim was to remove all rows from the file that were terminated by 0. To accomplish this I searched in the file using regex by 0$, then selected all occurrences with Ctrl + Shift + L and deleted them

Example of text search using regex and multiple selectors (Source: Author)

Multiple selectors are good friends, as you can always update multiple places at once
— Ctrl + D, click on Scroll and Drag, Alt + Click, Alt + Shift + I, Ctrl + Shift + L
— Added to Ctrl + Left/Right arrows and Ctrl + Home/End keys to navigate in the rows
Added to the previous one, check the indentation method, in most cases when you you’re using multiple cursors, adopting tabs for indentation make the work much easier instead of using spaces
You can preview your markdown files formatted, such as readme.md, by clicking in the top right corner “Open Preview” button

Open preview button on top right corner (Source: Author)

Attention to the file encoding, sometimes different and hidden characters are a pain in the neck, so checking the file encoding the first time you work with it may save you from unpredicted errors. You can check that in the bottom right corner of the window
In Addition to the previous one, if you are working on any file that will be executed by command line, check also the EoL (End of Line) of the file, check if you need it to be CRLF or LF. You can check that in the bottom right corner of the window
— On Linux distros, EoL is marked with a single ASCII character LF - \n
— On Windows, the EoL is marked with a CR-LF pair - \r\n
— If you are on Windows and working on a project that will be executed on a Linux distribution on Cloud, you can make use of WSL and clone your repository on a Linux environment, setting the EoL to LF by default

Encoding and EoL buttons on bottom right corner (Source: Author)

Latest tips

You can always search for plugins that can help you with a boring task. With a huge number of users, you can usually find someone else with the same pain as yours and developed a package to help with that.

Besides that, if you have the time, a quick look into new releases sometimes reveal useful features. All this information may sound too much to adopt all at once, but as you start using them gradually, it will become natural.

If you have reached here, thanks! I appreciate your interest and hope you enjoyed it. All those tips were based on previous experiences and colleagues I was able to help, but if you want to read more, in the references I left some links to other interesting articles about tricks with VS Code.