Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is the undisputed king of coding editors, with 75% of respondents to the 2025 Stack Overflow Survey citing it as a tool they use regularly. It not only has powerful competitors like Vim, Cursor, and Notepad++, but also builds on its parent project, Visual Studio, with a wider range of features.
VS Code excels as a text editor, but these extra features make it even better and are easy to miss or overlook.
Command palette and file search
A brilliant idea that is often imitated
In VS Code, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, you can execute any command with a click Ctrl+Shift+P (Windows) or Shift+Cmd+P (macOS).
This dropdown lists all the commands available to you in VS Code that would otherwise be buried in menus or behind buttons. You can and should use the palette’s integrated fuzzy search to find the command you’re interested in. It also highlights recent items and shows keyboard shortcuts so you can learn as you go.
Usage Ctrl+P / Cmd+Pyou can open a similar Quick Open palette that shows files in your project and recently opened files. Still, the built-in fuzzy search is great, and once you get used to it, it’s a faster way to get to a file.
Both of these functions are widely used, especially the command palette in editors such as Zed and Great Text.
Fast, convenient navigation
Never lose your place again
It’s easy to lose track when jumping around the codebase, and VS Code’s navigation shortcuts make switching between files easier than ever. press F12and you will immediately jump to the definition of whatever is under your cursor. But then what?
If you ever find yourself lost, try the Go Back and Go Forward commands, which have handy keyboard shortcuts: Alt+Left/Right Arrow In Windows and Ctrl+Hyphen or Shift+Ctrl+Hyphen On macOS.
These shortcuts are the equivalent of Back/Forward coding in your web browser and are just as useful. As with any keyboard combination, they may take a few goes to get into your muscle memory, but once you do, you’ll wonder how you ever did without them.
Change the name with confidence
Search and replace all but more convenient
When you change the name of a function or variable, you must also change all of its corresponding calls and references. It’s either laborious manual work, or something you can reduce a bit by doing a global search and replace. The problem is that replacing plain text isn’t always what you want, so you’ll have to go through each example to make sure you’re doing the right thing.
VS Code realizes how stupid this situation is and fixes it. press F2 you want to change when your cursor is inside a character such as a variable or function name. Type your substitution and VS Code will refactor your files with an extra preview to check what will happen before applying it.
The editor will apply simple changes immediately if they can unambiguously apply them. Otherwise, you’ll see in the preview what VS Code changes you should and shouldn’t make, selecting the ones that are appropriate by default.
For example, the IDE is smart enough to understand that you may or may not want to replace matching text in a string.
After using this feature a few times, you will never go back to default search and never replace again.
Examine the differences between the files
Find out what’s changed right in the editor
Code diff has long protected the command line, but editors are starting to take over and do it well. What better place to compare two files than the editor you already use?
In VS Code, right-click the file and select Select to comparethen right-click on the other and select Compare with selected. You’ll see a side-by-side view of the two files with changes clearly highlighted as deletions in red and additions in green.
Of course, you’ll see a similar difference view when looking at the Timeline view for a file managed with git or git changes for the file in your working tree.
Quick win code with Emmet
HTML, CSS, XML, etc. Highly loaded macros for
Emmet is one of the pre-installed extensions, though you’d never know it unless you looked for it. It’s also a fairly niche utility, but it quickly became essential to me.
I tend to write a lot of HTML and CSS general pursuit of web developmentand it always involves regurgitating a lot of pot – until the VS Code, that is. Emmet lets you automate all manual tagging using visible abbreviations a bit like CSS selectors. For example, here is the abbreviation Emmet:
ul#todo>li*5
In Emmet syntax, this represents a ul with id “todo” containing five empty li elements. Insert that abbreviation into an HTML file in VS Code and it will recognize it as the abbreviation Emmet.
Then, click Enter it or Tab To accept Emmet’s extension, you’ll immediately have the full markup equivalent in your editor:
A simplified IDE that still has a lot of features
VS Code was introduced as a free, lightweight alternative to Visual Studio; a more powerful text editor than a full-blown IDE. But its fast performance and ease of use are accompanied by many advanced features that can really change the way you work. with a significant expansion ecosystem and modern AI features, VS Code has certainly justified its place as the editor of choice.
