30 VSCode Keyboard Shortcuts You NEED to Know

Knowing your IDE and using keyboard shortcuts makes your life a lot easier. In this video, I share 30 of the most essential VSCode shortcuts that every developer should know.

🎓 Courses:

👍 If you enjoyed this content, give this video a like. If you want to watch more of my upcoming videos, consider subscribing to my channel!

👀 Code reviewers:
- Yoriz
- Ryan Laursen
- James Dooley
- Dale Hagglund

🔖 Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:40 General tips
2:29 Hide or show elements
4:03 Zen mode
4:58 Files
5:58 Navigating through files
8:21 Navigating through taps
10:39 Text Editing Shortcuts
11:05 Multi-select Cursor
13:00 Settings and Shortcuts
13:55 BONUS tip
15:14 Useless extras

#arjancodes #softwaredesign #python

DISCLAIMER - The links in this description might be affiliate links. If you purchase a product or service through one of those links, I may receive a small commission. There is no additional charge to you. Thanks for supporting my channel so I can continue to provide you with free content each week!

[gabrielem_]

Another command I use very often is ctrl + alt + '-' (hyphen) which brings you back to previous places your cursor was at, which is useful when you go through multiple lines of code in multiple files either because you're reading the code, debugging or switching between files implementing/modifying multiple things across them. It's a fast way to "go back to where I left that other function/line I was writing before writing this".

[BabakKeyvani]

Loved the insightful messages at the end 😅 thanks for all the great content Arjan. Happy holidays.
Also the point on switching the settings to its JSON version was cool 😎 I always had to use cmd+shift+P and search for settings (JSON).

[wanderingempress]

Was on the verge of looking up these shortcuts myself--thanks for sharing! I'm not in touch with my local community yet (still very green in my studies) and I forgot I had lo-fi Xmas playing in another tab, so the two minutes of coffee was actually really nice. Happy holidays to Arjan & co.

[AlexanderLyashuk]

It would be nice to have a follow up video specifically about pane/window navigation. How to split pane in two, now to move file to another pane, how to swap buffer, how to close all unsaved editors in a group etc. Surprisingly, those shortcuts are not listed in the "official" pdf cheatsheet and there are too many of them, but I think that not remembering them is the most frequent reason to use mouse in VSCode.

[edgeeffect]

Thank you so much for zooming in on code in your videos... it's one of the things that makes your videos much much better than a lot of what we see on youTube... any opportunity I get to say this in context I will, because it's very very important (other creators please take note). :)

[ajflorido]

really enjoy the last part of the video! :D The human touch of a coder. Thanks Arjan

[ujjawalsinha]

Alt + Shift + I to put cursor on all the lines. I use it quite a lot when I am writing SQL queries and I have to prepare comma seperated values.

[tthompson]

I was just looking these shortcuts up recently so nice to have a video for them too :)

[apefu]

This was surprisingly useful! I am very much a keyboard shortcut user, but I've never tried some of these. For some reason I decided to go along and the first new thing I tried was zen-mode. I used to think it was a useless feature, but OMG it felt so nice when I tried it!
I also had some trouble with multi-cursor actions so I went digging in the documentation. The command name is really useful because when you press Ctrl+Shift+p and type it you get the shortcut, and you also see some thing that you might want to use - Ctrl+D (Add Selection to Find Next Match) is fine and all, but Ctrl+Shift+L is glorious(Select All Occurences of Find Match) :)
There is also settings in the top right corner to toggle case sensitivity and match whole words only.

[xwcgbyt]

This video is really great!! My life is extended for ten years!!

[JonBrookes]

Hi Arjan, this is very usefull, thanks for posting.

I liked especially your combined use of Vim and VSCode shortcuts. I have found in the past that at least some Vim plugin extentions I used in VSC didnt play well with various keyboard shortcuts, for example the alt-up/down ( windows ) in order to reposition text but this clearly must have improved - I will revisit this thanks to your kindly reminder in this video as I have much missed having k-j-h-l navigation and the like from vi and vim when in VSCode.

I watched all the way to the end of the video so I also am tenacious. Well worth doing so and made me laugh. We all need something to cheer us up these days. Quality stuff.

[Vijay-Yarramsetty]

thanks for the hardwork you are putting together.

[RufusVidS]

Great tips that would have saved me hours by now if I knew them! Grabbing the cheat sheets. Also, love your post-content commentary!

[allo]

Hey Arjan, could you make a video on how to organize the actual files in a package? I find it non trivial to find other files using relative paths, especially once something is converted to a package you can import from elsewhere

[farkore]

Thanks for all those tips, you look a nice guy. Thank you!

[BiTeddy]

I loved the last few minutes of the video, after most everyone had gone. haha, made my day!

[adjaydev]

Great video! I like the Pycharm (Jetbrains) shortcuts. Especially the refactoring shortcuts. Makes me feel like a 10x developer 🤣

[LewisCowles]

You might be interested in staging and unstaging lines / selection (sadly is lines under the hood in vscode), intellij and gittower support ticking / committing individual lines. For cases where you need to git reset and refactor commits, or turn a big blob of experiment into structured and meaningful commits.

[robertwolinski]

Interesting, showing and hiding the terminal for me is Cmd+J on my mac and Ctrl+J on my windows PC. I'm still glad I looked into the setting, regardless if it's the same as what you have.

[loic]

CTRL + K to delete the whole current line. Super useful

Also CTRL+click on a variable and if you do that multiple times you can go back with CTRL + page left/right