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TOPICS Tips and Tricks

Visual Studio Code Tips and Tricks ✏ (https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-docs/blob/master/docs/getstarted/tips-and-tricks.md)

"Tips and Tricks" lets you jump right in and learn how to be productive with Visual Studio Code. You'll become familiar with its powerful editing, code intelligence, and source code
control features and learn useful keyboard shortcuts. This topic goes pretty fast and provides a broad overview, so be sure to look at the other in-depth topics in Getting Started
(/docs/getstarted/userinterface) and the User Guide (/docs/editor/codebasics) to learn more.

If you don't have Visual Studio Code installed, go to the Download (/download) page. You can find platform specific setup instructions at Running VS Code on Linux
(/docs/setup/linux), macOS (/docs/setup/mac), and Windows (/docs/setup/windows).

Basics
Getting started
Open the Welcome page to get started with the basics of VS Code. Help > Welcome.

In the bottom right of the Welcome page, there is a link to the Interactive playground where you can interactively try out VS Code's features. Help > Interactive Playground.
Command Palette
Access all available commands based on your current context.

Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+P

Default keyboard shortcuts

All of the commands are in the Command Palette with the associated key binding (if it exists). If you forget a keyboard shortcut, use the Command Palette to help you out.
Keyboard reference sheets
Download the keyboard shortcut reference sheet for your platform (macOS (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=832143), Windows (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?
linkid=832145), Linux (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=832144)).

Quick Open
Quickly open files.

Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+P

Tip: Type ? to view help suggestions.

Navigate between recently opened files

Repeat the Quick Open keyboard shortcut to cycle quickly between recently opened files.

Open multiple files from Quick Open

You can open multiple files from Quick Open by pressing the Right arrow key. This will open the currently selected file in the background and you can continue selecting files from
Quick Open.

Command line
VS Code has a powerful command line interface (CLI) which allows you to customize how the editor is launched to support various scenarios.

Make sure the VS Code binary is on your path so you can simply type 'code' to launch VS Code. See the platform specific setup topics if VS Code is added to your environment
path during installation (Running VS Code on Linux (/docs/setup/linux), macOS (/docs/setup/mac), Windows (/docs/setup/windows)).

# open code with current directory

code .

# open the current directory in the most recently used code window
code -r .

# create a new window

code -n

# change the language

code --locale=es

# open diff editor

code --diff <file1> <file2>

# open file at specific line and column <file:line[:character]>

code --goto package.json:10:5

# see help options

code --help

# disable all extensions

code --disable-extensions .

.vscode folder
Workspace specific files are in a .vscode folder at the root. For example, tasks.json for the Task Runner and launch.json for the debugger.

Status Bar
Errors and warnings
Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+M

Quickly jump to errors and warnings in the project.

Cycle through errors with F8 or Shift+F8

You can filter problems either by type ('errors', 'warnings') or text matching.

Change language mode

Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+K M

If you want to persist the new language mode for that file type, you can use the Configure File Association for command to associate the current file extension with an installed
language.

Customization
There are many things you can do to customize VS Code.

Change your theme

Change your keyboard shortcuts
Tune your settings
Add JSON validation
Create snippets
Install extensions
Change your theme
Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+K Ctrl+T

You can install more themes from the VS Code extension Marketplace (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/search?target=VSCode&category=Themes&sortBy=Downloads).

Additionally, you can install and change your File Icon themes.

Keymaps
Are you used to keyboard shortcuts from another editor? You can install a Keymap extension that brings the keyboard shortcuts from your favorite editor to VS Code. Go to
Preferences > Keymap Extensions to see the current list on the Marketplace (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/search?
target=VSCode&category=Keymaps&sortBy=Downloads). Some of the more popular ones:

Vim (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscodevim.vim)
Sublime Text Keymap (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscode.sublime-keybindings)
Emacs Keymap (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=hiro-sun.vscode-emacs)
Atom Keymap (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscode.atom-keybindings)
Eclipse Keymap (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=alphabotsec.vscode-eclipse-keybindings)

Customize your keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+K Ctrl+S

You can search for shortcuts and add your own keybindings to the keybindings.json file.

See more in Key Bindings for Visual Studio Code (/docs/getstarted/keybindings).

Tune your settings

By default VS Code shows the Settings editor, you can find settings listed below in a search bar, but you can still edit the underlying settings.json file by using the Open Settings
(JSON) command or by changing your default settings editor with the workbench.settings.editor setting.

Open User Settings settings.json

Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+,

Format on paste

"editor.formatOnPaste": true

Change the font size of various UI elements

// Main editor
"editor.fontSize": 18,
// Terminal panel
"terminal.integrated.fontSize": 14,
// Output panel
"[Log]": {
"editor.fontSize": 15
}

Change the zoom level

 "window.zoomLevel": 5

Font ligatures

"editor.fontFamily": "Fira Code",

"editor.fontLigatures": true

Tip: You will need to have a font installed that supports font ligatures. FiraCode (https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode) is a popular font on the VS Code team.

Auto Save

"files.autoSave": "afterDelay"

You can also toggle Auto Save from the top-level menu with the File > Auto Save.

Format on save

"editor.formatOnSave": true

Change the size of Tab characters

"editor.tabSize": 4

Spaces or Tabs

"editor.insertSpaces": true

Render whitespace

"editor.renderWhitespace": "all"

Ignore files / folders

Removes these files / folders from your editor window.

"files.exclude": {
"somefolder/": true,
"somefile": true
}

Remove these files / folders from search results.

"search.exclude": {
"someFolder/": true,
"somefile": true
}

And many, many other customizations (/docs/getstarted/settings).

Language specific settings

For the settings, which you only want for specific languages, you can scope the settings by the language identifier. You can find a list of commonly used language ids in the
Language Identifiers (/docs/languages/identifiers) reference.

"[languageid]": {

Tip: You can also create language specific settings with the Configure Language Specific Settings command.
Add JSON validation
Enabled by default for many file types. Create your own schema and validation in settings.json

"json.schemas": [
{
"fileMatch": [
"/bower.json"
],
"url": "http://json.schemastore.org/bower"
}
]

or for a schema defined in your workspace

"json.schemas": [
{
"fileMatch": [
"/foo.json"
],
"url": "./myschema.json"
}
]

or a custom schema

"json.schemas": [
{
"fileMatch": [
"/.myconfig"
],
"schema": {
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"name" : {
"type": "string",
"description": "The name of the entry"
}
}
}
},

See more in the JSON (/docs/languages/json) documentation.

Extensions
Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+X

Find extensions
1. In the VS Code Marketplace (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/vscode).
2. Search inside VS Code in the Extensions view.
3. View extension recommendations
4. Community curated extension lists, such as awesome-vscode (https://github.com/viatsko/awesome-vscode).

Install extensions
In the Extensions view, you can search via the search bar or click the More Actions (...) button to filter and sort by install count.
Extension recommendations
In the Extensions view, click Show Recommended Extensions in the More Actions (...) button menu.

Creating my own extension

Are you interested in creating your own extension? You can learn how to do this in the Extension API documentation (/api), specifically check out the documentation on contribution
points (/api/references/contribution-points).

configuration
commands
keybindings
languages
debuggers
grammars
themes
snippets
jsonValidation

Files and folders

Integrated Terminal
Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+`

Further reading:

Integrated Terminal (/docs/editor/integrated-terminal) documentation

Mastering VS Code's Terminal article (https://www.growingwiththeweb.com/2017/03/mastering-vscodes-terminal.html)

Auto Save
Open User Settings settings.json with Ctrl+,

"files.autoSave": "afterDelay"

You can also toggle Auto Save from the top-level menu with the File > Auto Save.

Toggle Sidebar
Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+B

Zen mode
Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+K Z
Enter distraction free Zen mode.

Press Esc twice to exit Zen Mode.

Side by side editing

Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+\

You can also drag and drop editors to create new editor groups and move editors between groups.

Switch between editors

Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+1 , Ctrl+2 , Ctrl+3
Move to Explorer window
Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+E

Create or open a file

Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+click ( Cmd+click on macOS)

You can quickly open a file or image or create a new file by moving the cursor to the file link and using Ctrl+click .

Close the currently opened folder

Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+F4

Navigation history
Navigate entire history: Ctrl+Tab

Navigate back: Alt+Left

Navigate forward: Alt+Right

File associations
Create language associations for files that aren't detected correctly. For example, many configuration files with custom file extensions are actually JSON.

"files.associations": {
".database": "json"
}

Preventing dirty writes

VS Code will show you an error message when you try to save a file that cannot be saved because it has changed on disk. VS Code blocks saving the file to prevent overwriting
changes that have been made outside of the editor.

In order to resolve the save conflict, click the Compare action in the error message to open a diff editor that will show you the contents of the file on disk (to the left) compared to
the contents in VS Code (on the right):

Use the actions in the editor toolbar to resolve the save conflict. You can either Accept your changes and thereby overwriting any changes on disk, or Revert to the version on disk.
Reverting means that your changes will be lost.

Note: The file will remain dirty and cannot be saved until you pick one of the two actions to resolve the conflict.

Editing hacks
Here is a selection of common features for editing code. If the keyboard shortcuts aren't comfortable for you, consider installing a keymap extension
(https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/search?target=VSCode&category=Keymaps&sortBy=Downloads) for your old editor.

Tip: You can see recommended keymap extensions in the Extensions view with Ctrl+K Ctrl+M which filters the search to @recommended:keymaps .

Multi cursor selection

To add cursors at arbitrary positions, select a position with your mouse and use Alt+Click ( Option+click on macOS).

To set cursors above or below the current position use:

Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+Alt+Up or Ctrl+Alt+Down

You can add additional cursors to all occurrences of the current selection with Ctrl+Shift+L .

Note: You can also change the modifier to Ctrl/Cmd for applying multiple cursors with the editor.multiCursorModifier setting (/docs/getstarted/settings) . See Multi-cursor
Modifier (/docs/editor/codebasics#_multicursor-modifier) for details.

If you do not want to add all occurrences of the current selection, you can use Ctrl+D instead. This only selects the next occurrence after the one you selected so you can add
selections one by one.

Column (box) selection

You can select blocks of text by holding Shift+Alt ( Shift+Option on macOS) while you drag your mouse. A separate cursor will be added to the end of each selected line.

You can also use keyboard shortcuts (/docs/editor/codebasics#_column-box-selection) to trigger column selection.

Fast scrolling
Pressing the Alt key enables fast scrolling in the editor and Explorers. By default, fast scrolling uses a 5X speed multiplier but you can control the multiplier with the Editor: Fast
Scroll Sensitivity ( editor.fastScrollSensitivity ) setting.

Copy line up / down

Keyboard Shortcut: Shift+Alt+Up or Shift+Alt+Down

The commands Copy Line Up/Down are unbound on Linux because the VS Code default keybindings would conflict with Ubuntu keybindings, see Issue #509
(https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/509). You can still set the commands editor.action.copyLinesUpAction and editor.action.copyLinesDownAction to your own
preferred keyboard shortcuts.
Move line up and down
Keyboard Shortcut: Alt+Up or Alt+Down

Shrink / expand selection

Keyboard Shortcut: Shift+Alt+Left or Shift+Alt+Right
You can learn more in the Basic Editing (/docs/editor/codebasics#_shrinkexpand-selection) documentation.

Go to Symbol in File
Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+O

You can group the symbols by kind by adding a colon, @: .

Go to Symbol in Workspace
Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+T
Navigate to a specific line
Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+G

Undo cursor position

Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+U

Trim trailing whitespace

Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+K Ctrl+X

Code formatting
Currently selected source code: Ctrl+K Ctrl+F

Whole document format: Shift+Alt+F

Code folding
Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+[ and Ctrl+Shift+]
Select current line
Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+L

Navigate to beginning and end of file

Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+Home and Ctrl+End

Open Markdown preview

In a Markdown file, use

Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+V

Side by side Markdown edit and preview

In a Markdown file, use

Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+K V

The preview and editor will synchronize with your scrolling in either view.
IntelliSense
Ctrl+Space to trigger the Suggestions widget.

You can view available methods, parameter hints, short documentation, etc.

Peek
Select a symbol then type Alt+F12 . Alternatively, you can use the context menu.

Go to Definition
Select a symbol then type F12 . Alternatively, you can use the context menu or Ctrl+click ( Cmd+click on macOS).

You can go back to your previous location with the Go > Back command or Alt+Left .

You can also see the type definition if you press Ctrl ( Cmd on macOS) when you are hovering over the type.

Peek References
Select a symbol then type Shift+F12 . Alternatively, you can use the context menu.
Find All References view
Select a symbol then type Shift+Alt+F12 to open the References view showing all your file's symbols in a dedicated view.

Rename Symbol
Select a symbol then type F2 . Alternatively, you can use the context menu.
Search and modify
Besides searching and replacing expressions, you can also search and reuse parts of what was matched, using regular expressions with capturing groups. Enable regular expressions
in the search box by clicking the Use Regular Expression .* button ( Alt+R ) and then write a regular expression and use parenthesis to define groups. You can then reuse the
content matched in each group by using $1 , $2 , etc. in the Replace field.

.eslintrc.json
Install the ESLint extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=dbaeumer.vscode-eslint). Configure your linter however you'd like. Consult the ESLint
specification (https://eslint.org/docs/user-guide/configuring) for details on its linting rules and options.

Here is configuration to use ES6.

 {
"env": {
"browser": true,
"commonjs": true,
"es6": true,
"node": true
},
"parserOptions": {
"ecmaVersion": 6,
"sourceType": "module",
"ecmaFeatures": {
"jsx": true,
"classes": true,
"defaultParams": true
}
},
"rules": {
"no-const-assign": 1,
"no-extra-semi": 0,
"semi": 0,
"no-fallthrough": 0,
"no-empty": 0,
"no-mixed-spaces-and-tabs": 0,
"no-redeclare": 0,
"no-this-before-super": 1,
"no-undef": 1,
"no-unreachable": 1,
"no-use-before-define": 0,
"constructor-super": 1,
"curly": 0,
"eqeqeq": 0,
"func-names": 0,
"valid-typeof": 1
}
}

package.json
See IntelliSense for your package.json file.

Emmet syntax
Support for Emmet syntax (/docs/editor/emmet).
Snippets
Create custom snippets
File > Preferences > User Snippets (Code > Preferences > User Snippets on macOS), select the language, and create a snippet.

"create component": {
"prefix": "component",
"body": [
"class $1 extends React.Component {",
"",
"\trender() {",
"\t\treturn ($2);",
"\t}",
"",
"}"
]
},

See more details in Creating your own Snippets (/docs/editor/userdefinedsnippets).

Git integration
Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+G

Git integration comes with VS Code "out-of-the-box". You can install other SCM providers from the extension Marketplace. This section describes the Git integration but much of the
UI and gestures are shared by other SCM providers.

Diffs
From the Source Control view, select the file to diff.

Side by side

Default is side by side diff.

Inline view

Toggle inline view by clicking the More Actions (...) button in the top right and selecting Switch to Inline View.

If you prefer the inline view, you can set "diffEditor.renderSideBySide": false .

Review pane

Navigate through diffs with F7 and Shift+F7 . This will present them in a unified patch format. Lines can be navigated with arrow keys and pressing Enter will jump back in the
diff editor and the selected line.
Edit pending changes

You can make edits directly in the pending changes of the diff view.

Branches
Easily switch between Git branches via the Status Bar.

Staging
Stage all

Hover over the number of files and click the plus button.

Stage selected
Stage a portion of a file by selecting that file (using the arrows) and then choosing Stage Selected Ranges from the Command Palette.

Undo last commit

See Git output

VS Code makes it easy to see what Git commands are actually running. This is helpful when learning Git or debugging a difficult source control issue.

Use the Toggle Output command ( Ctrl+Shift+U ) and select Git in the drop-down.

Gutter indicators
View diff decorations in editor. See documentation (/docs/editor/versioncontrol#_gutter-indicators) for more details.

Resolve merge conflicts

During a merge, go to the Source Control view ( Ctrl+Shift+G ) and make changes in the diff view.

Set VS Code as default merge tool

git config --global merge.tool code

Debugging
Configure debugger
Open the Command Palette ( Ctrl+Shift+P ) and select Debug: Open launch.json, which will prompt you to select the environment that matches your project (Node.js, Python,
C++, etc). This will generate a launch.json file. Node.js support is built-in and other environments require installing the appropriate language extensions. See the debugging
documentation (/docs/editor/debugging) for more details.

Breakpoints and stepping through

Place breakpoints next to the line number. Navigate forward with the Debug widget.
Data inspection
Inspect variables in the Debug panels and in the console.
Inline values
You can set "debug.inlineValues": true to see variable values inline in the debugger. This feature can be expensive and may slow down stepping, so it is disabled by default.

Task runner
Auto detect tasks
Select Terminal from the top-level menu, run the command Configure Tasks, then select the type of task you'd like to run. This will generate a tasks.json file with content like the
following. See the Tasks (/docs/editor/tasks) documentation for more details.

{
// See https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=733558
// for the documentation about the tasks.json format
"version": "2.0.0",
"tasks": [
{
"type": "npm",
"script": "install",
"group": {
"kind": "build",
"isDefault": true
}
}
]
}

There are occasionally issues with auto generation. Check out the documentation for getting things to work properly.

Run tasks from the Terminal menu

Select Terminal from the top-level menu, run the command Run Task, and select the task you want to run. Terminate the running task by running the command Terminate Task

Define keyboard shortcuts for tasks

You can define a keyboard shortcut for any task. From the Command Palette ( Ctrl+Shift+P ), select Preferences: Open Keyboard Shortcuts File, bind the desired shortcut to the
workbench.action.tasks.runTask command, and define the Task as args .

For example, to bind Ctrl+H to the Run tests task, add the following:
 {
"key": "ctrl+h",
"command": "workbench.action.tasks.runTask",
"args": "Run tests"
}

Run npm scripts as tasks from the explorer

With the setting npm.enableScriptExplorer , you can enable an explorer that shows the scripts defined in your workspace.

From the explorer you can open a script in the editor, run it as a task, and launch it with the node debugger (when the script defines a debug option like --inspect-brk ). The
default action on click is to open the script. To run a script on a single click, set npm.scriptExplorerAction to "run". Use the setting npm.exclude to exclude scripts in
package.json files contained in particular folders.

Portable mode
VS Code has a Portable mode (/docs/editor/portable) which lets you keep settings and data in the same location as your installation, for example, on a USB drive.

Insiders builds
The Visual Studio Code team uses the Insiders version to test the latest features and bug fixes of VS Code. You can also use the Insiders version by downloading it here (/insiders).

For Early Adopters - Insiders has the most recent code changes for users and extension authors to try out.
Frequent Builds - New builds every day with the latest bug fixes and features.
Side-by-side install - Insiders installs next to the Stable build allowing you to use either independently.

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7/3/2019

IN THIS ARTICLE

Basics

Command line

Status Bar

Customization

Extensions

Files and folders

{ Editing hacks

IntelliSense

Snippets

Git integration

Debugging

Task runner

Portable mode

Insiders builds

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