Other Useful Features

00:00 After taking a look at debugging, let’s see some other useful features that VS Code comes with.

00:07 If you open up a new Visual Studio Code project or folder, you will be presented with this empty window that has the most important shortcuts right here, and I’d suggest just go ahead and try them out.

00:18 So Command + Shift + P, the first one, just gives us access to any command that we want to. If you want to do something, just try and type it here. So, change the color theme, for example. All right, Preferences: Color Theme.

00:32 And there you go. Simply with just going through it, we get the preview and I can change the color scheme if I want to. Nice! I’ll switch it back, though. What was that? I think this one, default.

00:45 Okay. Go to File, another shortcut. Command + P just shows us the files that are part of this project, and I can very easily switch between different files.

00:55 I’ll switch to a different file here and switch back to my original file with very short commands. So, this is the Command + P, here.

01:05 Then, Find in Files, or essentially also just this search magnifying glass here on the left opens up the same thing. Command + Shift + F allows me to search, and it doesn’t just search files, but it searches in files, so Find in Files. As you saw before, I made this other file that has this variable called greetings. greeting, I guess I called it. There you go. So that finds it, and by clicking, it takes me right away exactly to where this variable is defined, which is pretty cool! Then we mentioned we have support for source control, like all good IDEs have. I can initiate a Git repository and it’s going to tell me what has changed. I can easily revert changes, commit to GitHub, et cetera, et cetera. We already looked at the debugging feature that’s sitting here. And then there’s a whole swath of great extensions that you can install. I want to mention a very useful one called Live Share.

02:03 If you install this, you can actually collaborate with other people using VS Code and work on the same files together. I don’t have this installed right now, but I just want to show you how this looks like.

02:18 You can work in your own environment and another person can have a completely different environment. You can see them editing in here. It’s essentially like Google Docs but for code. Any of the people that are part of the session can make changes and it appears in the same file.

02:33 So it’s a great way to collaborate and figure out, maybe debug something together, get some input from your teammates before committing some code. And so that’s a cool feature that you can get, and just one of the examples of the great extensions that VS Code has available.

02:53 One more thing before I finish this video. You might have noticed that I’m working with legacy Python down here, Python 2.7. That is just because I’m on a different user and I don’t have Python 3 installed there. Usually I work with Python 3, so make sure that you work with modern Python.

03:08 But if you have a couple of different versions of Python that you’re working with, you can simply change the interpreter here by just clicking on there and giving the path to your editor, or just they’re going to pop up here. You select it, press Enter, and then you’re working with that editor at that point. Okay!

03:24 So, I hope you can see that Visual Studio Code is a great, lightweight, and very useful editor that allows you to do a lot of stuff and can be one of your best companions when starting on your coding journey.

03:35 I hope you’ll enjoy it, and see you in the next video, where we’ll talk about how you can learn more about using Visual Studio Code. See you there!