Visual Studio Code (VS Code) - Misc

• Keyboard shortcut cheat sheet: http://donovanbrown.com/post/visual-studio-code-keyboard-shortcut-cheat-sheet

  • (it’s for Windows so replace Ctrl with Cmd)

• Ctrl + p / Cmd + P search for a file name (and also commands and other stuff I think)

• Cmd + Shift + F - Find in files

• Cmd + o - open a file (but it has to be recently opened or already open?)

• Cmd + shift + o - search for a symbol

• Select vertical column of text:

  • Place the cursor where you want it
  • hold down Shift + Alt/Option , then click and drag with the mouse
  • (On a Mac it’s Shift + Alt/Option in most apps)

Moving Terminal and other panels around

• To move it into right panel (“secondary sidebar”):
  • 1. (if you don’t already have terminal open) Terminal => New terminal
  • 1. View => Appearance => Secondary sidebar (turn on)
  • 1. Drag the terminal from bottom to new sidebar panel on right
• To move it back to bottom again:
  • 1. View => Appearance => Panel (turn on)
  • 1. Drag terminal back to the bottom by clicking and holding on the little “>” icon, top left of the Terminal panel.
• General arrangement of screen components
  • View => Appearance
  • The “primary sidebar” is the one that contains folder view
  • The “secondary sidebar” is the one that is optional and can have stuff ragged into it
  • The “panel” is the thing that normally appears at the bottom and contains things like output and debug console.
  • To get bottom panel to appear to right of primary sidebar instead of filling the width of the screen:
    • View => Appearance => Align panel => Center

Debugging

• If you want to debug code in VS Code, you need a launch.json file.
• Click the Play button over on the left, and you’ll see text saying something like “To customize Run and Debug create a launch.json file”. If you click the link, it will create one for you.
• You might then want to add new configurations for new languages (eg Ruby) - to do that, click the link under “Show all automatic debug configurations” and then click “Add configuration”.
• If you’re configuring debugging for Ruby, there are some extra instructions here, under the link to Debugging Ruby with breakpoints

Copy/paste - don’t copy source formatting by default

• When you try to copy/paste from VS Code to other editors (eg MS Word), it brings ALL source formatting with it - including background colour.
• Turning this off is not trivial! But it is possible.
• First find your settings.json file.
  • On a Mac, note that there is a space in the path
  • Also on my Mac I have VSCode insiders, which also has a space in the path
  • This command will open it for editing on my Mac: vim "$HOME/Library/Application\ Support/Code - Insiders/User/settings.json"
  • More info on path here
• Now edit the file to add the following line, within the curly brackets: "editor.copyWithSyntaxHighlighting":false
• More info here
• Mine looks like this:

{
    "editor.copyWithSyntaxHighlighting":false
    "files.autoSave": "afterDelay"
}