VSCode column selection with keyboard

Question

Any way to do this kind of selection using only the keyboard?

With the regular Visual Studio I would use Shift + Alt + Arrows to get these columns selected. Unfortunately it doesn't work in VSCode.

Answer 1

By default, this is Ctrl + Shift + Alt + Arrow.

If you would like to rebind it to align with Visual Studio, put this in your keybindings.json:

{
    "key": "shift+alt+down",
    "command": "cursorColumnSelectDown",
    "when": "editorTextFocus"
},
{
    "key": "shift+alt+left",
    "command": "cursorColumnSelectLeft",
    "when": "editorTextFocus"
},
{
    "key": "shift+alt+pagedown",
    "command": "cursorColumnSelectPageDown",
    "when": "editorTextFocus"
},
{
    "key": "shift+alt+pageup",
    "command": "cursorColumnSelectPageUp",
    "when": "editorTextFocus"
},
{
    "key": "shift+alt+right",
    "command": "cursorColumnSelectRight",
    "when": "editorTextFocus"
},
{
    "key": "shift+alt+up",
    "command": "cursorColumnSelectUp",
    "when": "editorTextFocus"
}

This will conflict with the default functions of that duplicating a line or growing/shrinking with smart select, so you can add this to swap those to require Control:

,
{
    "key": "ctrl+shift+alt+down",
    "command": "editor.action.copyLinesDownAction",
    "when": "editorTextFocus && !editorReadonly"
},
{
    "key": "ctrl+shift+alt+up",
    "command": "editor.action.copyLinesUpAction",
    "when": "editorTextFocus && !editorReadonly"
},
{
    "key": "ctrl+shift+alt+right",
    "command": "editor.action.smartSelect.grow",
    "when": "editorTextFocus"
},
{
    "key": "ctrl+shift+alt+left",
    "command": "editor.action.smartSelect.shrink",
    "when": "editorTextFocus"
}

Answer 2

You can do column selection several ways,

• As you've noted, Place cursor to the start (left) of first word of first column press and hold Alt + Shift followed by Right Arrow to select top row (Try Ctrl + Shift if previous key combination is not working). With the keys pressed proceed with selecting the column by pressing Down Arrow key.

• Place cursor to the start (left) of first word of first column Press and hold Alt + Shift and repeatedly press Down Arrow to add more cursors. (Some versions of VSCode also use Ctrl+Shift instead) Once cursors added select the words by a simple Shift + Right Arrow

• Ctrl+D selects next occurrence of the word currently under cursor.

• Ctrl+Shift+L selects all occurrences of word currently selected under cursor, regardless of if those words are above of below the cursor.

Answer 3

You can see your current keyboard shortcuts using the menu "File" -> "Preferences" -> "Keyboard Shortcuts". And then search by "cursorColum"

Answer 4

Here's what just worked for me with vscode:

Version: 1.39.2 (user setup)
Commit: 6ab598523be7a800d7f3eb4d92d7ab9a66069390
Date: 2019-10-15T15:35:18.241Z
Electron: 4.2.10
Chrome: 69.0.3497.128
Node.js: 10.11.0
V8: 6.9.427.31-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.18362

1. place cursor at upper left of block to select
2. hold down ctrl-alt-shift
3. press down-arrow however many times you want
4. press right-arrow however many times you want

When step 3 was to press right-arrow it didn't work for me.