VS Code Tips

I'm a huge fan of VS Code, and suspect I'm not the only one. We've emerged from a world of very heavy IDEs Integrated Development Environments). Many of them are still around. They're specialized IDEs that do some things very well, and a very popular one is Visual Studio. Visual Studio has been around for quite some time.

- Sahil Malik

When Microsoft entered the IDE game around C++ and there were things like Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), that’s when Visual Studio started taking off. Before that, we had IDEs built into DOS. They would take over your entire screen and they were text-based. IDEs such as Turbo C++, or Turbo, by a company called Borland, were the rage. Visual Studio has gone through some twists and turns as well. We’ve had specialized IDEs, such as Visual Interdev for web-based scenarios or FrontPage Express for lightweight web page editing. There was a time when a VB programmer had a different IDE than a C++ programmer.

It wasn't until we had VS Code that we had an IDE that works with nearly every language, every platform, and yet is fast, efficient, and super customizable. It runs on Mac, Linux, Windows—it even runs in a browser. It works on Python node.js, .NET, and anything else you can imagine. I'll go so far as saying that I'm hard-pressed to think of another application as good as VS Code. VS Code is built on Electron and a lot of people like to complain about Electron being heavy, yet we all use VS Code. That alone is a testament to how well VS Code is built.

In this article, I'm going to talk about some of my favorite tips and tricks about my favorite IDE, VS Code. Although I’m writing this on a Mac, many of these concepts will port to Windows, so you may have to replace COMMAND key, WIN key, etc.

What Is VS Code?