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Boost Your Productivity With Visual Studio/VS Code Shortcuts and Refactorings
Over 20 shortcuts and refactoring techniques to enhance your workflow
If you have learned to code like me, writing MS Excel macros with little to no support of your IDE, you might also have adapted the behavior of trying to write everything by yourself — instead of letting you help out by your IDE.
Modern IDEs or code editors support you with a vast amount of keyboard shortcuts, refactoring options, and automatic code completion. Mastering them will greatly improve your productivity in coding.
In this article I will present you some techniques, I learned, to become extremely performant writing code with Microsoft Visual Studio (2019+). With the extension Visual Studio Keymap, most of these techniques will also apply to Microsoft Visual Studio Code.
Not using Visual Studio or VS Code? I would still recommend, that you check out some of the shortcuts and refactoring options down below, and research what your IDE can do for you. Your coding experience will drastically improve when you learn to use them.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Duplicate Lines (CTRL+D)
When you have to add multiple similar lines of code, you can just duplicate the selected line with CTRL+D and edit them afterward.
Move Lines up and down (ALT+↑/↓)
You can move a line up and down in your code file by using ALT+↑ or ALT+↓. This often comes in handy in collaboration with “Duplicate Lines”.
Multi-Line Edit (ALT+SHIFT+↑/↓)
Multiple similar lines, one below the other, can be edited all at once with ALT+SHIFT+↑/↓
Delete Line (CTRL+SHIFT+L)
If you want to delete a whole line, you can just use CTRL+SHIFT+L. However in this case I like to use a custom shortcut like CTRL+SHIFT+DEL, as i think this is more memorable.
