Stumbled on a hidden feature in VS Code last week

Ngl I was messing around with the debugger for a Python script and accidentally found the 'Run without Debugging' option. Honesty it saved me like 30 minutes of stepping through code I didn't need to check. Have you guys tried the multi-cursor editing yet? That thing is a game changer for renaming variables fast.

3 comments

3 Comments

jessej231mo ago

Wait wait wait... you didn't know about Run without Debugging? I've been using that for like a year now lol. Multi-cursor though, that one took me forever to discover and now I can't live without it.

blakestone1mo ago

Hold on there @jessej23, I'm going to play the other side of this. I actually think Run without Debugging is one of the most useless features in VS Code. If you're writing code that you're not confident enough to just hit F5 and see what breaks, you're probably spending too much time second guessing yourself. Debugging is where you actually learn what your code is doing under the hood, so skipping that step feels like you're avoiding the hard part. Multi-cursor I'll give you, that one is great for quick edits, but I honestly worry people use it as a crutch to avoid learning proper find and replace with regex. I'd rather spend ten minutes learning regex patterns than clicking around with ten cursors hoping I didn't miss something. Maybe I'm just old school, but shortcuts that skip the learning process don't feel like wins to me.

nancyg141mo ago

Jesse, no shame for the late discovery. I literally just saw a blog post about the built in GitLens features so I bet there's a ton of stuff we're all missing. I heard from a coworker that multi-cursor is actually called "sublime text style" editing or something like that. Honestly, I think the best hidden gem for me was when I realized you can use F1 to search commands instead of clicking through menus. It's like learning a whole new editor every time someone posts about it.