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VS Code Shortcuts That I Would Teach Myself if I Had a Time Machine With Limited Fuel

Vitor Paladini on July 22, 2020

— "Hey, it's me. Listen up, I don't have much time." — "Wait, what?! What is happening?! Who are-How did you get in my house?! Wh-why do you look ...

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Paula Santamaría • Jul 22 '20

Best "vscode shortcuts" post I've ever read. Extra points for the b99 reference.
Next time you go back make sure to teach your past self this one: Shift +Alt + F. It will automatically format your code (if you have a formatter installed for that language).

Diogo Souza • Jul 23 '20

This one is really useful. The Mac version is Option + Shift + F

Vitor Paladini • Jul 22 '20

Thanks, Paula. Glad that someone caught that 😄

Shift + Alt + F is also pretty great, thanks for sharing!

maxime216 • Jul 23 '20

You can also configure VSCode to run this onSave as instance which allow you to dont forget formatting ;)

Paula Santamaría • Jul 23 '20

Love this idea, thanks!

Aleksandr Hovhannisyan • Jul 23 '20 • Edited

My favorites:

Ctrl+L. Highlight the current line. Press it N times to highlight the next N lines.
Alt+Up/Down. Move an entire line of code (or the current selection) up/down. No more cutting/pasting.

Adam Parkin • Jul 25 '20

The move line up/down is like my #1 used hotkey.

The other one I use a lot that's similar is SHIFT+ALT+up/down for duplicating the current line above or below.

Paweł Kowalski • Jul 22 '20

I find "move line up/down" shortcut very useful.
Also cmd+a (beginning of the line) and cmd+e (end of line) very useful - not only in vscode, just in general, including terminal.

Drew McConville • Jul 29 '20

Great one! (fyi this was Ctrl+A/E on mac for me)

Milho • Aug 24 '20

Do you know how long I tried to find this info? Thank you! Lot of my time will be saved

Paweł Kowalski • Aug 25 '20

Glad i could help :-))

Vitor Paladini • Jul 22 '20 • Edited

Man, I kid you not, that was literally my expression when I tried your suggestion.

Fantastic, never even knew that this kind of navigation was possible.

matt short • Jul 23 '20

can't see this one mentioned elsewhere, but i must use it every hour.

CTRL + / >> comment/uncomment a line or selection

also mentioned elsewhere, but different

CTRL + ' >> open a terminal window (but this one is apostrophe, not backtick)

Nishchal Gautam • Jul 23 '20

I use forward and backward button on my mouse

maxime216 • Jul 23 '20 • Edited

Good article that will probably help many people :)
Well, some other things that are usefull =>
(Sry Idk for windows)
Command + d : select current word (really essential shortcut) and, if you press it again, it will select the next occurence of this word :)
And an other one which allow you to work on several line at the same time:
Command + option + arrow (up or down), then do what you want with your selected lines (esc to leave this mode !)

Mohammad Fazel • Jul 22 '20 • Edited

So creative and perfect article!

Thank you for sharing it.

What I use every day is opening and closing terminal :

Command/Ctrl + backtick
Command/Ctrl + shift + backtick

Vitor Paladini • Jul 22 '20

Command/Ctrl + backtick is toggle Integrated Terminal and Command/Ctrl + shift + backtick creates a new one, right? Thanks for sharing!

Mohammad Fazel • Jul 22 '20

👌👌

Walther Seidel • Jul 29 '20

in spanish keyboards is:
Ctrl + ñ" (open/closes a terminal)
"Ctrl + Shift + ñ" (open an additional terminal)

Rajat Kanti Nandi • Jul 23 '20

If you are on mac with touchbar you can also press the arrow keys in the touchbar. Super convenient.

Radu Pacurar Vasile • Jul 29 '20

Nice post and nice replies. I'll also add some shortcuts I'm using and I didn't see here.

Select several lines. SHIFT+ALT+i will create multicursor. Then CMD+LEFT/RIGHT to go to the beginning/end of the lines.
CMD+P. Then > to see the latest command, or : to jump to specific line. For example, if I have some text I want to uppercase it, I select the text, CMD+P, then type > and start typing uppercase. You will see a Transform to Uppercase command :)

Beni Cherniavsky-Paskin • Jul 29 '20

Alt+1, Alt+2, Alt+3 ... also work for focusing tabs. It also works in Chrome (both Ctrl+digits and Alt+digits), Firefox (only Alt+digits) and gnome-terminal (only Alt+digits), making this the one shortcut to remember! [Linux]

leob • Jul 29 '20 • Edited

Control-Shift-P (or Command-Shift-P) is the "master key" which shows your most recent commands, and allows you to search for any other command, including keyboard shortcuts - learn this one first, and then gradually you'll learn the rest ...

Control-Q is also one I use a lot - switching between the Explorer view, the Source Control view and the Debug/Run view.

Ah and then Control-] or Cmd-] (on OSX) to jump to end bracket/begin bracket is a powerful one.

Melissa Manousos • Jul 29 '20

CMD + ] on my Mac causes the line to indent (like using TAB) rather than jumping to brackets. I wonder if you have mapped your hot keys differently.

leob • Jul 30 '20

Ah yes maybe I remapped it, some key combos are unintuitive or conflict with other things so then I'd remap them.

Phong Duong • Jul 29 '20

In my vscode, I use Ctrl+Tab to navigate between tabs

Nilay Mehta • Jul 25 '20

My favorite is Ctrl + D to select Next occurrence. And hold ctrl key for using multi cursor.

Gio • Jul 23 '20

This is a great list! I Found myself referring back to this after reading it a few days ago :)

Quick observation:

Command/Ctrl+W closes the current tab, Command/Ctrl+Shift+T reopens it"

For me (I've made no edits that I can recall) this closes all "except" the current tab. And then pressing it again re-opens all. Did you customize this setting?

Melissa Manousos • Jul 29 '20 • Edited

That seems like specialized behavior, @Gio.
The default on VSCode (as well as most browsers and operating systems) is that CMD + W closes the current window.