My Most Useful VSCode Shortcuts

30 Mar, 2025

In my day-to-day development work I prefer to use VSCode as my editor. Whether I'm coding or note-taking, VSCode is the workhorse of my day. There are a lot¹ of online² debates³ over editors however in the end it comes down to user preference. More recently there have also been discussions about traditional editors versus AI-assisted ones like Cursor. I've tried Cursor and although I find its AI assistant really useful, I don't do enough side projects to justify the cost so I tend to stick with VSCode and use ChatGPT or Claude when I need to.

After several years of using VSCode, I grew tired of constantly reaching for my mouse to navigate or searching Google for how to change settings, so I decided to learn more about the built-in keyboard shortcuts. I also took the chance to explore some extensions that might make my day easier. VSCode has a very popular marketplace for extensions and anyone can build⁴ their own and share it with the world.

Since learning about the keyboard shortcuts that are available I started writing down the ones that I knew I would use the most often and tried to use them in my day-to-day work. After a month or two I got to the point where I am moving much faster than I used to and don't have to refer to my cheat sheet as often. Below are my most used keyboard shortcuts that I think are the most useful for increasing productivity.

Note: I'm using VSCode shortcuts for MacOS. However similar shortcuts are available for other operating systems as well.

Navigation

These shortcuts are mainly for moving around the different windows within VSCode.

Terminal

The integrated terminal is a built-in terminal window available within VSCode. It's most useful if you want to run terminal commands from within your workspace or to run scripts. These shortcuts are super helpful for working with it.

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs⁵ are a graphical navigation concept commonly used on web pages and other UI software. VSCode has its own version that lies horizontally across the top of an open file to show the path from the root of the workspace to whatever symbol your cursor is currently pointing to.

The above shortcut will open the breadcrumb viewer and then you can use the up and down arrows to jump through the symbols in your current file. You can even use the left and right arrows to navigate up and down your workspace tree and go to a different file. I find it most useful for jumping around from place to place within my currently open file.

Editing

These shortcuts are best for making editing and writing easier.

Miscellaneous

These next few shortcuts are ones I didn't see fit into the above categories but that I still find really useful for general productivity.

Bonus: Snippets

Aside from keyboard shortcuts, there are also other parts of VSCode that can improve your workflow. A couple of them are Snippets and Extensions. VSCode Snippets⁶ are custom templates that make it easier to reuse common code. Some snippets are open sourced like this PyTorch snippet extension but you can make your own as well by editing a language specific snippet file⁷. Here's my custom Python snippet file which has a single entry for the common if __name__ == code block.

{
    "if(main)": {
        "prefix": "ifmain",
        "body": ["if __name__ == \"__main__\":", "    ${1:pass}"],
        "description": "Code snippet for a `if __name__ == \"__main__\": ...` block"
    },
}

All I have to do is type in ifmain and then hit enter for the rest to autofill.

Bonus: Favorite Extensions

Shortcuts are great but extensions can also greatly speed up your workflow and generally make development more enjoyable. Here are some extensions I end up using often.

Share your favorites

I've noticed that I take my hands off my keyboard less frequently thanks to using these shortcuts (although I occasionally have to look at my cheat sheet to remember some). Let me know what your favorite shortcuts or extensions are!

Links