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10 VS Code Vim Tricks to Boost Your Productivity ⚡

Anson Heung on June 13, 2023

Learning Vim is one of the best things any aspiring software engineers can do to improve their productivity. I’ve been using the VSCodeVim extensio...
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Anurag Pramanik •

Thanks a lot for sharing this. Apart from this I use FindItFaster extention in vscode. It's like telescope.nvim but within the terminal. Works really well. You can adjust the keybindings in settings.json like <leader>ff to find files etc.

 "vim.normalModeKeyBindingsNonRecursive": [
    {
      "before": ["leader", "f", "r"],
      "commands": ["find-it-faster.findWithinFiles"]
    }
  ],
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Mohanad Mohamed Eissa Ghali •

Extra Tip

At this part of the article
#4 - Navigate Menus without Arrow Keys
you can remap the keys you use to go up and down in opened menus to be more intuitive by being close to the original Vim up and down motion j - k.

Steps

  • Open your command pallet (CTRL + Shift + P)
  • Type Preferences: Open Keyboard Shortcuts (JSON)
  • Add this to your file 
    {
        "key": "ctrl+j",
        "command": "workbench.action.quickOpenSelectNext",
        "when": "inQuickOpen"
    },
    {
        "key": "ctrl+k",
        "command": "workbench.action.quickOpenSelectPrevious",
        "when": "inQuickOpen"
    }
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Now when any menu is opened, you're able to Move to the next item by using Ctrl + j and to the previous item by using Ctrl + k !

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Pierre-Henry Soria ✨ •

Great suggestion! ⚡️

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Dmitry •

Thanks! Very cool & useful tips.

May be useful setting for peek view:

"editor.peekWidgetDefaultFocus": "editor",

May be useful keybindings for switching occurences/code view in peek view:

  {
    "key": "alt+right",
    "command": "togglePeekWidgetFocus",
    "when": "inReferenceSearchEditor || referenceSearchVisible"
  },
  {
    "key": "alt+left",
    "command": "togglePeekWidgetFocus",
    "when": "inReferenceSearchEditor || referenceSearchVisible"
  },
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adavis9012 • • Edited

"Bravo! Thanks for sharing this. At first, I was surprised and thought, 'How do you navigate between tabs if you're overwriting the switch tab functionality with 'gt'?' But then I saw the clever solution you provided in the second part, which includes a great mapping. Well done man!" Also, I can't even imagine how long it took you to develop this setup, again, thanks for sharing.

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Irshath Codes •

Hey this was very helpful for me. Especially gpd I needed this. Thank you very much. You're amazing!

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Stephen Plautz •

This was super helpful, I appreciate you taking the time to put this together!

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Anson Heung •

Thank you so much :)

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Arnav •

This was really helpful, I've been using this extension for months.

Based on the this article i can assume you know how to remap binding in correct way, I'd appreciated if you can help me out with this,

Please take a look at this.

github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim/discussio...

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Anson Heung •

Glad to hear that you found this article helpful :)

As for your question, sorry that I don't know the answer. I also had the same question a while ago haha

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Kunal Rajesh Salunke •

Is there a way to navigate between open files?

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Anson Heung •

Yes, I mapped H and L to focus the previous and next opened file respectively. Try this in settings.json:

"vim.normalModeKeyBindings": [
    {
      "before": ["H"], // Focus previous tab at the left
      "commands": ["workbench.action.previousEditor"]
    },
    {
      "before": ["L"], // Focus next tab at the right
      "commands": ["workbench.action.nextEditor"]
    },
]
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Bolig 2017 •

Please add a tip to change "change" and "delete" behaviour from cutting content into DELETING. Add a leader-c and leader-d to change-with-yank and delete-with-yank