Useful Shortcuts⌗

Moving lines up/down⌗

shortcut: alt + up-arrow/down-arrow

Add cursors to the end of lines of selected code⌗

shortcut: alt + shift + i

Add cursor directly up or down⌗

shortcut: ctrl + alt + up-arrow/down-arrow

Useful packages⌗

Error Lens⌗

Adds a nice inline description when something is wrong with your code.

Black formatter⌗

Adds black as one of the code formatters in VS Code. A nice tip: turn on the setting format on save.

Code Spell Checker⌗

A neat plug-in that checks the spelling of words in comments and doc-strings, but also checks the spelling of variable names.

GitLens⌗

Adds git-blame annotation, shows authors above each class definition and much more git goodness.

Rainbow CSV⌗

A cool plug-in that highlights different columns in a .csv file.

Rewrap⌗

Wrapping comments, docstrings and text to 90 character width by just pressing alt+Q. Ideal when working with ruff and/or black.

Ruff⌗

The official Ruff plugin for VS-Code. Ruff is a collection of python linters that works extremely fast.

GitLab Workflow⌗

When reviewing other’s open merge requests, this plugin lets you explore the merge request from within VS code in a much nicer way than the web browser editor on gitlab.com. It allows you to read the description and comments as well. Placing comments is a bit of a hassle, as it doesn’t support “reviews” where you can submit all comments at once. It also doesn’t support code suggestions.

Grammarly⌗

Spell and grammar checker for .md and .txt files. To check .md files, you will have to add the following to your Visual Studio Code settings:

    "grammarly.files.include": [
        "**/*.txt",
        "**/*.md"
    ],

or via the interface:

image-2

Other⌗

Useful settings⌗

Copy-paste images into markdown files⌗

Add these two lines to your Visual Studio Code settings

    "editor.experimental.pasteActions.enabled": true,
    "markdown.experimental.copyFiles.destination": {
        "**/*": "images/"
    },

or via the interface:

image

and

image-1

This allows you to paste an image directly into a markdown file with ctrl+v / cmd+v. This inserts the line

![image](images/image.png)

into your document and creates a copy of the image in images/image.png, where images is the name of the folder relative to your file. This can be changed in the settings above. If you include multiple images, each image name will be appended by a number, i.e. image-1.png, image-2.png, etc.

Editable installs⌗

Sometimes VS Code has problems with auto-completion and finding the definitions of imported symbols when they come from a package that is installed in editable mode, e.g. via pip install -e .. With recent versions of setuptools (>=0.64.0), editable installs behave a bit differently and these cause issues. There are three solutions to this:

  1. Downgrade setuptools (i.e. pip install setuptools<0.64)
  2. Instruct pip to use a legacy mode: pip install -e . --config-settings editable_mode=compat. The developers at setuptools do warn however that this is only a temporary solution and will likely to be changed and later removed entirely in future versions of setuptools.
  3. Add the project to the python path. When testing out new features inside a jupyter notebook it is sufficient to add the line sys.path.insert(1, "path-to-package") in the top cell. "path-to-package" can be either an absolute path (e.g. "/users/rsoko/dev/my-package") or a relative path ("my-package", "./my-package" or even "../my-package").