Tabbing out from quotes and brackets
Today’s tip is about a simple but handy VSCode extension to improve the editor’s editing experience called TabOut. Judging from the installation count, many people find it useful.
The extension kicks in when the cursor is placed next to single or double quotes, open and square brackets, braces, and other characters typically used in pairs (visually: ‘‘, ““, (), [], {}, <>). It also works for some other special characters, like colons, semicolons, the equal sign (=), and so on.
A simple way to think about the “tabbing out” experience is that hitting the Tab key will skip over the special character (like pressing the right arrow key) if the cursor is placed before it. If the cursor is placed after, the cursor will skip to the next occurence, which allows you to e.g. skip to the end of a parameter list inside parentheses, to the end of a string inside quotes, or to the next tag in HTML.
It is worth playing around a little bit to get the feel for the “tabbing in” and “tabbing out”. While it is a small editing feature, I think it provides better experience than the Visual Studio Code default behavior.
Until next time,
Petr