VSCode Shortcuts for Jedi

September 28, 2020

tl;dr: spoiler

Learn how to use at least the top 3 shortcuts described in Jedi section

First things first: Why using keyboard Shortcuts?

VSCode is a great IDE (if you use sufficient extensions). But to get the most of it, it’s necessary to know how to use it and take advantage of the features that it give to us. As it’s very user-friendly, you could use a great part of its functionality using its GUI. However, as a “Jedi” developer, your should always search for the best way of accomplishing your tasks.

Moreover, usually your mental flow to achieve what you are planning to do is better when you don’t need to think in less important stuff. So, having the power of a keyboard driven workflow and avoid using the mouse (when possible) will help in thinking about the problem you are solving and not WHERE to click. This process is similar to a interruption during a complex task thinking. If you are very focused in some tasks, listen to a good music and drinking a good coffee, you probably feel great and your thoghts just flow through your mind. However, being distracted by something in the middle of the development, usually make you lose some time during the “context switching”. Of course, that the real distraction would consume more time than clicking on the GUI, but, again, we are talking about improving everything we can to do our best.

To really learn and remember about the following VSCode keyboard shortcuts, I highly recommend you to do each of those shortcuts to make your brain remember.

Obs.: Those shortcuts are for Linux and some may be a little different on other platforms.

Rookie shortcuts: the essential

Example: Select some text, press F1 and search for transform to uppercase

Not only for VS Code, but good to mention:

Intermediary shortcuts: ready to rock

Pressing F12 with the cursor in some Class, Function, etc. it will navigate to its definition;

Jedi shortcuts: take care to not hack NASA unintentionally

It’s great to select text between separators like: (), {}, [], ..; It’s also great to select one word in a camelCase string;

With the cursor over the text to select

Try using it after make a selection mistake. For example, pressing CTRL+D 3 times, instead of just 2.

Conclusion

As you can see, there is a lot to learn in VSCode, we explored only about shortcut, but of course there are tons of features that worth learning to improve your day or at least make it easier.

Written by Bruno Haetinger. Go to my website

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