Advanced Text Editing in VS Code: A Step-by-Step Guide

Visual Studio Code has editing tools that turn ten minutes of repetitive typing into a few keystrokes: several cursors at once, rectangular selections, regex find and replace, and commands that sort or de-duplicate lines. This guide covers the ones worth learning first, with the correct shortcuts for Windows, macOS and Linux in current VS Code.

1. Multi-cursor editing

Several cursors let you type the same change in many places at once.

Once you have several cursors, everything you type, delete or paste happens at each one. Home and End move every cursor to the start or end of its own line, which is ideal for adding a comma or a quote to many lines.

Example: select ten lines of names, press Shift+Alt+I (Shift+Option+I on Mac) to put a cursor at the end of each, and type , to turn them into a list.

If you prefer Ctrl+Click (Cmd+Click) for multi-cursor, change the setting Editor: Multi Cursor Modifier.

2. Select every match: Ctrl+D and Ctrl+Shift+L

This is the fastest way to rename something within one file.

To delete every occurrence of a word, select them all and press Delete.

3. Column (box) selection

A column selection is a rectangle of text across several lines, useful for editing aligned data, tables or log lines.

• Mouse: hold Shift+Alt (Shift+Option on Mac) and drag. Dragging with the middle mouse button works too.
• Keyboard: Ctrl+Shift+Alt plus the arrow keys on Windows, or Shift+Option+Cmd plus the arrow keys on Mac. On Linux, look up Column Select in Keyboard Shortcuts (section 8).
• Always on: turn on Selection › Column Selection Mode in the menu, and normal drags make rectangles until you turn it off.

Older guides say Alt+drag makes a column selection. In VS Code, Alt+Click adds cursors; the column drag needs Shift as well.

4. Move, copy and delete lines

All of these work with multiple cursors, so Ctrl+Shift+K with a cursor on five lines deletes all five.

5. Sort, de-duplicate and transform lines

VS Code has built-in commands for line clean-up. Select the lines, open the Command Palette with Ctrl+Shift+P (Cmd+Shift+P) and type the command name:

• Delete Duplicate Lines removes repeated lines and keeps the first copy.
• Sort Lines Ascending and Sort Lines Descending sort alphabetically.
• Transform to Uppercase, Transform to Lowercase and Transform to Title Case change case.
• Join Lines merges the selected lines into one.
• Trim Trailing Whitespace removes spaces at the ends of lines.

To remove duplicates across a whole list, sort first so identical lines sit together, then run Delete Duplicate Lines. Older guides describe a workaround using block comments; it does not remove duplicates, so use this command instead.

6. Find and replace with regular expressions

The icons in the find box switch on match case, whole word and regular expressions (.*), and the Replace All button next to the replace field changes every match. With regular expressions on, you can reuse parts of the match in the replacement:

• Find (\w+)@example\.com, replace with [email protected] to change a domain in many addresses while keeping the names.
• Find ^\s*$\n, replace with nothing to remove blank lines.
• Use \u$1 or \U$1 in the replacement to make the captured text start with a capital, or all capitals.

Before a replace across all files, check the preview in the Search view, and make sure your work is committed in Git so you can undo it.

7. Snippets and Emmet

Snippets expand a short prefix into a block of code. Type the prefix, pick the suggestion and press Tab or Enter. To make your own, open the Command Palette, type snippets, choose the Configure Snippets command, then pick a language or a global snippets file.

Emmet is built in for HTML and CSS. Type an abbreviation and accept it from the suggestion list:

div.container>ul>li*5

expands to a div with the class container, containing a list with five items. To expand Emmet with the Tab key without waiting for the suggestion, turn on the setting Emmet: Trigger Expansion On Tab.

8. Find any shortcut

You do not need to memorise everything. Open Keyboard Shortcuts with Ctrl+K then Ctrl+S (Cmd+K then Cmd+S) to search every command, see its shortcut on your system and change it. The Command Palette also shows the shortcut next to each command, so using the palette is a good way to learn them.

9. Using VS Code with Domain India hosting

VS Code works well for editing a site on your computer and then publishing it:

• Shared hosting (cPanel, DirectAdmin, Webuzo): upload with FTP (or SFTP once SSH is enabled), or deploy with Git; see deploying with Git. Jailed SSH access is available on every shared hosting plan. It is off by default; ask support to enable it for your account. SSH login uses a key, see generating SSH keys. VS Code's Remote SSH feature installs its own server program in your home folder, and we have not verified that it runs inside the jailed shell, so ask support before relying on it.
• VPS: a Domain India VPS is self-managed with full root access, so Remote SSH and any other tools are yours to set up.
• App Platform: Node.js apps are detected automatically, and other languages deploy with a Dockerfile; see getting started with the App Platform.

The plan card shows the live Domain India list price, excluding 18% GST.

Ready to put your edits online? Read deploying with Git, set up your SSH key, or ask support to enable jailed SSH on your hosting account.