A long-held view amongst programmers is that keeping your hands on the keyboard, using keyboard shortcuts, is much more efficient than
switching to the mouse and back. I certainly find its true for me, so I often seek to codify tasks into keyboard shortcuts.
I’ve used emacs for many years which is great for this as you can programme it in using elisp and build up complex macros. But I find
myself increasingly using VS Code for programming these days, and so I’ve gradually migrated parts of my
workflow.
With some caution, I find that the latest generative AI coding assistants (via LLMs) can sometimes be useful (a topic for another blog post), once there is appropriate validation and verification in place. One mode of interaction with such tools is the ‘auto complete’ style. This can be useful when working in an unfamiliar language or with an unfamiliar library, or when there is a repeated pattern of code or something trivial you need doing. But it can also quickly become annoying and more of a hindrance than a help. I realised that I needed an easy way to toggle gen-AI autocomplete on and off rapidly, without having to waste time clicking through menus.
Here’s how I do it in VS Code in case it’s useful for others:
Adding the Keyboard Shortcut
Open your keybindings.json file in VS Code (you can access it via Code → Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts, then click the “Open Keyboard Shortcuts (JSON)” icon in the top right, or opening up the command palette and typing ‘keyboard’ should reduce the options to show you “Open Keyboard Shortcuts (JSON)”).
This file contains a list of keybinding records in JSON format, e.g., [{...}, {...}]. Add the following entry anywhere inside the list:
{
"key": "shift+cmd+;",
"command": "github.copilot.completions.toggle"
}
I’ve chosen the Shift+Cmd+; combination because it’s easy to reach for me (and easy to remember) and doesn’t overlap with anything else I need.
I use a couple of Apple Macs hence the use of Cmd, but that could easily be Ctrl for a non-Mac keyboard; you can of course choose any other combination that suits you better.
So your file should look something like:
[
{
"key": "shift+cmd+;",
"command": "github.copilot.completions.toggle"
},
// ... your other keybindings ...
]
With this it is easy to toggle the auto complete on to get some help (hopefully just writing some code I was going to write anyway!) and then I can easily toggle it off when things get annoying (often!), or I really need or want to figure it out myself. I have it off a lot of the time, but it’s useful to be able to flick it on, and then back off again, occasionally. Of course, if you are in another editor, there will be another editor-specific way of doing this, but I’d definitely recommend having a keyboard shortcut like this if this is a feature you use often.
Hopefully this helps someone! I’m always recommending to students to get proficient with keyboard shortcuts and customising their workflow to be as efficient as possible, to enable focussed work rather than losing time to navigating a UI and context-switch overhead.