I spend a lot of time with my editor so I always try to customise it to maximise my productivity and confort. I've used a lot of editors over time:

• Sublime Text
• Atom
• WebStorm
• Visual Studio Code
• IntelliJ IDEA

But I always come back to Visual Studio Code. It's fast, has a lot of extensions and it's very customisable. If I can, I'll do it with VSC, the only exceptions are when I'm working with Java/Kotlin and then I don't have much of an option 😔

Having experience with all these editors, I've been able to learn from all of them features, shortcuts and customisations that I had to apply to VSC.

I'll summarise here some of the most important things for me and share a link to my configuration so you can apply it to your VSC. Besides, I'm planning on writing a mini-book to cover in detail all these points. If you are interested just ping me in twitter 🙂

Visuals

I started programming more than 10years ago. Back then, I was working in Java and I didn't enjoy it. I was using Eclipse and it was slow and ugly and fill with tons of stuff.

I've always been a fan of minimalism and I like to have a clean and simple UI. So, when I started using VSC, I started to customise it to make it look like I wanted.

I went from something like this

To something like this

Can you find out all the differences? 😄

Dark theme is non-neogotiable for me. Currently, I'm using the Github Dark Theme and I'm very happy with it.

You can find all my settings in my dotfiles

Shortcuts

Who has time for mouses 😅? I'm no 10x developer that masters VIM and thousands of shortcuts. For a long time, I was happy using some basic ones but one day I realise that the key to make my shortcuts stick was context. Usually, shortcuts have no relationship between them, just random combination of keys.

I started grouping things together and now I can reason what the combination is based on what I'm trying to do. Some examples:

Activity Bar: Refers to the icons on the left(or right) side of the editor.

• cmd+k puts us in the this mode, combininig it with:
  • cmd+g toggles the git bar
  • cmd+e toggles the explorer
  • cmd+x toggles the extensions
  • cmd+b toggles the bar

I rely so much in some shortcuts like toggling terminal and editor than they don't need a context. Eg:

• cmd+e toggles the editor
• cmd+t toggles the terminal

You can find all my shortcuts in my dotfiles

Plugins

Not much to say here. The most interesting ones for me are:

• GitLens
• Prettier
• VS Icons

You can find the full list of my plugins in my dotfiles