You change editors every few years; these techniques come with you. They have the most reliable return on investment of anything here.

Multi-cursor

For repeating the same edit across several lines.

ActionVS CodeJetBrains
Add next occurrence⌘D / Ctrl+D⌃G / Alt+J
Select all occurrences⌘⇧L / Ctrl+Shift+L⌃⌘G / Ctrl+Alt+Shift+J
Add cursor above/below⌥⌘↑↓ / Ctrl+Alt+↑↓⌥⌥↑↓ (Alt twice)
Add cursor anywhere⌥click / Alt+clickSame

Typical uses: quoting ten list items at once, or fixing several import statements simultaneously.

Regex find and replace

Patterns beyond what multi-cursor can handle go faster with a regex. Turn on the .* icon in the search box and reference capture groups with $1, $2.

GoalFindReplace
Swap call argumentsmove\((\w+), (\w+)\)move($2, $1)
var to const (declarations only)\bvar (\w+) =const $1 =
Strip console logs^\s*console\.log\(.*\);?\n(empty)
Normalise quotes'([^']*)'"$1"

Careful: always preview how many matches will change, and do it with a clean working tree so undoing is easy.

Understanding LSP

The Language Server Protocol separates “knowledge of a language” from the editor. Completion, go-to-definition, and live error reporting all come from a language server; the editor only draws the result.

  • VS Code extensions install language servers automatically.
  • Neovim manages them with nvim-lspconfig and mason.nvim.
  • Because several editors share the same server (gopls, pyright, typescript-language-server), switching editors barely changes the quality of your code intelligence.

When something misbehaves, read the language server log first. Usually the project root was detected wrongly or dependencies aren’t installed.

Pinning team rules with EditorConfig

Even with everyone on different editors, indentation and newlines can be unified. Put .editorconfig at the project root.

  root = true

[*]
charset = utf-8
end_of_line = lf
insert_final_newline = true
trim_trailing_whitespace = true
indent_style = space
indent_size = 2

[*.py]
indent_size = 4

[*.md]
trim_trailing_whitespace = false

Most editors support it natively or with one extension. It removes a whole class of noisy-diff arguments.

Snippets

If you type the same block repeatedly, register it. In VS Code, ⌘⇧P → Snippets: Configure Snippets:

  {
  "React function component": {
    "prefix": "rfc",
    "body": [
      "export function ${1:Name}() {",
      "  return <div>$0</div>;",
      "}"
    ]
  }
}

$1 is the first cursor stop, $0 the last.

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Last updated 19 Aug 2026, 00:00 UTC. history