Do you feel intimidated when you see other programmers quickly navigate through hundreds of lines of code, make blazing fast edits or open multiple tabs during development and hardly touch their mouse or touch-pad ?
It feels like you are watching a magician perform amazing feats and you instantly think she is born to code. You imagine that attempting such feat is out of your reach and would take you forever to catch up.
Well, in this short guide, I will show you the website I built and help you learn that it will only take some daily practice and patience to be fluent with your IDE.
I have been using VSCode for over a year now. When I’m working, I often switch from one operating system to another depending on the task at hand.
I use MacOS primarily but have to perform some tasks on Ubuntu and Windows. On all these platforms, I enjoy using VSCode. To lookup or learn more VSCode shortcuts, I usually go to the official docs and check the pdfs for the OS I’m currently on. I really don’t like the idea of checking each documentation for Mac, Linux and Windows at different times. I find it pretty boring.
A Better Reference
I decided to create a single page website where I and anyone using VSCode on the major platforms could easily go to learn or reference these shortcuts.
It took me about 3 days to finish it as I have a full-time job and used my spare time to work on it. I also turned it into a PWA ( Progressive Web Application ) so it works well offline and can be installed on your desktop and mobile.
Here is the live website: VS Code Shortcuts!
The shortcuts are grouped into 11 main sections:
General
Basic Editing
Multi-cursor and Selection!
Search and replace
Rich languages editing
Navigation
Editor Management
File Management
Display
Debug
Integrated Terminal
You can easily search within each of the sections to quickly find the shortcut you’re looking for. How cool is that!
Best way to learn them
The easiest way to learn the shortcuts is by good old repetition. You simply determine what you want to learn and then go through the list, pick one that helps ease or speed up your workflow and practice for about 10 to 20 mins. If you do this little exercise daily, it won’t be long and you are the code magician others will be aspiring to be like.
What about those best X lists of shortcuts for Y?
Those lists are great and I check them out sometimes too. However, you best know your workflow and context you are working with and therefore the most useful shortcuts that work well for you.
Keep learning and don't forget to share. Thank you
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