Scott Hanselman’s superb video on text editing is a must watch for developers of all levels because it is something that we as developers do on a daily basis, whether it is in a source file, JSON, XML or just a vanilla text file.

Here are four keyboard shortcuts I learnt from this video that I can see myself using regularly.

Smart select

shift + alt + →

Smart select expands out the selection which comes very useful when working with source code files.

See how smart select expands out making it trivial to select the friends section of the sample JSON. Try selecting the same text with the mouse to see how much time smart select will save you.

Matching bracket

shift + ctrl + \

This will come in useful when you need to navigate to a closing bracket that is off screen.

In this example I am able to quickly navigate to the closing bracket at line 58.

Select all occurrences of current selection

ctrl + shift + L

Useful for multiple edits Once you have selected you can overwrite or edit the selection.

In this example I am changing Blue to Blues.

Moving on up (or down)

alt + ↑

alt + ↓

One of my new favourites. I can’t believe I haven’t seen this before.

Acknowledgements

Scott Hanselman. Listen to his podcast, subscribe to his YouTube channel. You will learn stuff that will make you a better developer.

Thanks to the Wikipedia page on keyboard shortcuts for giving me the idea to use HTML & CSS to style the keyboard shortcuts.