10 Shortcuts in Visual Studio Code for Enhanced Productivity

Ricardo Castellanos
6 min readMar 1, 2024

Introduction:

After years of coding experience, I’ve come to appreciate the power of efficiency, and sometimes a bit of laziness can work in our favor. That’s why I swear by one dependable code editor: Visual Studio Code (VSCode). In this article, I aim to unveil some of my top VSCode shortcuts and tricks that I employ daily. These not only simplify my life as a developer but also significantly save time in the process.

1. Selecting and Unselecting Multiple Words (Ctrl+D and Ctrl+U)

Ctrl+D allows you to select the next occurrence of the word where your cursor is located, which is especially handy for making multiple changes in your code. Conversely, Ctrl+U unselects the last selection, making it useful when you want to deselect specific instances.

Use Case: Suppose you’re working on a project that involves processing text data, and you have a long document with various occurrences of specific keywords or phrases. You want to perform a unique operation on some of them, such as highlighting or formatting, while keeping others in their original state.

By using Ctrl+D and Ctrl+U, you can quickly select the instances of the keywords you want to modify and apply your desired formatting, while…

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