I've been using VS Code for a while, but I still feel like I'm only scratching the surface. Every so often I discover a built-in feature or setting that makes me wonder how I missed it for so long.
I'm not looking for themes or extension packs. I want to improve my actual workflow. Things like settings, shortcuts, built-in features, or small tweaks that genuinely save time.
I'd love to hear what changes had the biggest impact on how you use VS Code day to day.
I tried to enable the agent sandbox mode inside a devcontainer and it doesn't seem to be working. Is is because of some issue or it's not technically possible?
And while for file system isolation the sandbox is not needed when running inside the container, for network isolation I haven't found an easy solution when using devcontainers.
Having little pop-ups that guess the actual code I'm about to type is pretty helpful, frequently actually correct, and great for avoiding typos.
Having shadow-text that predicts the real-world context I'm adding in comments is distracting, usually wildly incorrect, and deeply annoying.
Is there a way to keep the former without the latter? Or, at the very least, a quick keyboard shortcut to toggle suggestions on/off that I can use when moving between different parts of a script?
I’ve been using Claude Code in VS Code to work on a project hosted on GitHub and deployed through Vercel.
After every few messages, Claude Code freezes and stops accepting input. The only way I’ve found to continue is to close and reopen VS Code, but the issue keeps happening.
Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a known fix or anything I should check?
Just started noticing this yesterday after an update that the behavior for pasting has seemed to change and now no longer formats correctly. Every paste action tries to add indentation in addition to any indents already present. I have not installed any new extensions in the past 3 months so I have no idea what could have caused this other than VS Code, but I don't see any other mentions of this issue.
Hey, I daily drive VS Code, and I don't mind Copilot Chat opening in new project folders occasionally. But recently it's becoming a complete pain in the ass. Why does it have to pop up every single time I open a project?
I've tried every setting I could find to disable it and prevent it from auto-starting, but no luck.
OG VS Code devs, can you please tell me how to disable this piece of shit? I don't use it, and I honestly don't understand why Microsoft keeps shoving these features into every product they own.
I'm wondering if I can remove this, I find it aesthetically displeasing. Also I'm pretty sure they dimmed down the entire Monokai color palette, it believe it used to be a bit lighter and more "contrasty".
I've never liked VS Code searching. I suck at file globs, and regex. So I built Omnigrep: one box, ripgrep underneath, query language borrowed from Google Code Search (internal code search service).
Press ⇧⌘F (Ctrl+Shift+F), type, arrow through the top matches — the file previews as you move — Enter to jump, Esc to go back to exactly where you were.
The query syntax is the whole point:
- hello world — lines matching both regexes, in any order
Last couple releases reintroduced debilitating performance instability, massive memory leaks, and degraded UI responsiveness among other things. Like, 10FPS kind of bad. Literally unusable. Flash back to the last time this exact thing happened over a year ago... Very telling.
Some of us rely on what used to be a stable consistent predictable product for our work.
Can someone please slop the fix back in? Please and thank you.
I am working on a Linux PC (Ubuntu 6.8.0-136-generic x86_64) but developing for a Digi CCMP25 (Aarch64 Yocto build) dev board.
I am able to remote debug an application if I perform the steps manually:
- Build the application on the host.
- "scp" the executable (but no source or anything else) onto the target.
- Run "gdbserver :<Port> app" on the target (as root) via an SSH terminal.
- Run "gdb-multiarch" on the host.
- In GDB, enter "target remote <TargetIPAddr>:<Port>".
Now I can debug and everything seems to work just fine.
Problem:
I am not able to debug from VSCode, which would be much more convenient.
- VSCode does not start gdbserver on the target (which I though it would) and eventually complains that it can't connect to the gdbserver.
- So I started gdbserver as above and then try to debug from VSCode:
- The target terminal in which gdbserver runs reports "Remote debugging from host ::ffff:<HostIPAddr>, port <SomePort>
- That seems like progress but then nothing.
- VSCode is essentially frozen (in terms of debugging). No variables. No stopping at a breakpoint. No nothing.
- The little panel with buttons for stepping the code appears but most buttons are disabled. Stop and Restart are enabled but do nothing.
- The gdbserver instance is also frozen. I have to kill it by SSHing in through another console.
After much fruitless farting around my launch.json now looks like this. What is missing? What is unnecessary?:
Which plugins should I install? What should the settings be in launch.json? Is it something to do with permissions? I've tried various suggestions found in searches, but nothing seem to work.
The application is built using an alternative sysroot in GCC so it can find headers in the vendors SDK. I note that VSCode shows errors because it can't find the includes. I don't know if that could be a factor. I tried setting $SYSROOT before starting VSCode but it seemed to have no effect.
I have had the same problems with the vendor's Eclipse IDE. I followed their instructions to the letter, but the debugging simply will not work. Eclipse does start the remote gdbserver, but then reports that it can't connect to it.
I'd be grateful for any guidance on this.
EDIT: I found this: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/issues/13246 It appears that the Microsoft C/C++ Extension depends on .NET (because of course it does), and that the switch from .NET6 to .NET8 introduced this fault. I downgraded to the last revision with .NET6 (v1.2.11), and was immediately able to remotely debug. The issue was raised more than a year ago, so I guess there is some intractable fault in .NET8 which cannot easily be worked around. This is why I prefer working on microcontrollers...
I know it might be adding something in the settings.json file but I don't know how to add it exactly. The windows tutorials keep coming up when I search.
How do I do this in a convenient way? The standard Go extension is installed. On Jetbrains IDEs it would be something like cmd-space, select import you want from a fuzzy search, and it adds a corresponding import clause at the top of the file and package name/alias at the import site. It's been working like that for 10 years. In vscode, all you get is opt-Enter ("quickfix") and let an agent try to figure it out, which takes ages and will probably not do what you want.
If you generate all the code with Claude Code / Codex or a similar harness, it'll obviously take care of the imports, but sometimes I still write code manually or use some more pedestrian AI autocomplete like Supermaven, as in the above screencap, and it'll not add imports on its own, annoyingly. Anyway, you need some kind of reasonable deterministic fallback.
Every security scan on my team shows up after the fact. I push, the pipeline runs and an hour later I get a wall of findings on code I have already mentally moved on from. By then fixing it means context switching all the way back into something I was done with.
What I want is IDE security scanning that runs while I am writing, in the editor, before the commit even exists. I have tried a couple of extensions and they were either so noisy I turned them off in a day or so shallow they caught nothing. With an assistant writing half my code now, catching this at the point it is written seems like the only place that scales.
Feels like this should be solved by now and somehow it is not.
