Now of course the look and feel of your editor and your IDE is one thing but it doesn't stop there.
Once you start writing code, there are also other things that really matter,
for example that you are aware of some key shortcuts.
Now again, here in Visual Studio Code, you can find many shortcuts by just going into the different sections
here that allow you to edit your code
and there, you always find the shortcut that would allow you to do the same thing.
These are simple things like undoing or redoing which you'll use a lot or copy and pasting which you
probably know
but then we also got things, like here toggling the comments which I did already in an earlier module
which allows you to quickly comment a line in or out. And the shortcuts you're seeing here might not
be the same ones I have here because you can re-bind these shortcuts and I'll come back to that in
a second.
Also important are the selection shortcuts you find here or the selection modes you find here.
This allows you to quickly select similar values for example with the add next occurrence shortcut if
you want. There I could mark log entries and if I now hit the shortcut for this or I choose the option
here of course but using the shortcut is simply faster,
so if I do this, then it selects the next occurrence of this same word if you will in my code.
So now I have this selected and this selected and that's great for renaming for example, if I want to
rename this, I can just hit the shortcut until I have all occurrences selected,
I also get a hint here on the right in the scroll bar where all these occurrences are and then I can
give this a new name
and now it's renamed in all the places where I did use it.
So that allows you to change and refactor things much faster and this is also a crucial shortcut
and all these selection shortcuts can be really helpful, for example for moving something up a line or
down a line, that makes restructuring your code which you will ultimately do a lot in development.
way easier. Now not all shortcuts might work for you, maybe you want to change one and you can do that
under code preferences and then there, keyboard shortcuts. If you click on that, you find all the shortcuts
which are built in and there are a lot of shortcuts but the good thing is it's really great to search
this,
for example if you're not happy with that add next occurence shortcut here and you want to use a different
one,
well you can type add next and it's actually this one here,
you can also search for a key binding. If you can't find a shortcut otherwise, you can search for this
here on Mac by just typing command D and now it shows you all shortcuts that include the command key
and the D key, of course also the control or the shift key is supported, same for space and so on. So you
can also search for keys and find the actions that are bound to these keys.
So that gives you a lot of power to really find all the different commands you might need
and then of course it's needless to say that you can change them by just right clicking on this and
then change key binding.
So really make sure that you adjust these shortcuts to your requirements and that you simply have a
look at the menu up there, the menus up here, to find some actions that might look useful to you and bind
these to shortcuts which you can reach
and as you work and as you grow as a developer, you'll find more and more shortcuts to work with.
So the goal is not to stop developing for two days now and just explore all possible shortcuts,
you can do that if you like but my recommendation would be that you just have a brief look at the options
you find here in the menu and experiment with these options and then as you continue with development
and as you write code, you will automatically reach situations where you think that would be really nice
if I could fix it with a shortcut and then you can go to this shortcut changing menu, to the keyboard
shortcuts menu here and simply search for the action you want to do and see which shortcut this has
and if it doesn't have a shortcut yet, you can assign one.
So using shortcuts really is something which I would recommend.