17 VS Code Tips That Will Change Your Data Science Workflow

Key Takeaways

Visual Studio codes is an amazing IDE for data science but you have to tweak it a little in order to get the most out of it so let's fix this first step is to use data science project templates you can build your own or use something like Cookie Cutter data science which has a predefined structure while you can open projects by going to file open folders there's a much faster way to do this navigate to your project folder in the terminal then type in code followed by a DOT and hit enter this will open up the directory in Visual Studio code with all your folders if you are on Mac you first have to run the shell command in order to add the code extension to your path then the next thing you have to do is file save as a workspace and now your project is stored in official Studio code workspace file in your directory with the jupyter extension you can run jupyter notebooks right inside Visual Studio code just create a file with the IPI MV extension and visual studio code will interpret it as a notebook select your python environment in the top right corner and then proceed to copy code from stack Overflow as usual it wasn't me it was not me I think one of the most powerful features of vs code for data science is running python code in an interactive window to set this up you go to the settings and then search for send selection to interactive window make sure this box is checked which will on pressing shift enter send selected python code to an interactive Jupiter session now let's make your workflow even faster by using keyboard shortcuts so basically official Studio code has a keyboard shortcut for anything that you can think of now instead of clicking around with the mouse all day we of course want to give our colleagues the impression that we're actually good developers by just using the keyboard to navigate around our code for now there are only a handful of keyboard shortcuts that you have to remember in order to never touch the mouse again when navigating Fierce code and of course all of these can be customized using the keyboard shortcuts over here see what I did there not anymore we don't do that here close it boom this is how we do it you can use command plus numpad to navigate around the different editors that are open on the screen so command 1 for the editor over here on the left and then Command 2 for the editor over here on the right now Pro tip and this is not default I like to set the focus into primary sidebar on command 0 and in this way I can navigate to the Explorer with command 0. now an even better way to open up files is by hitting command P this will open up the file search and even list your most recently opened files this way you don't have to navigate through the Explorer but you can just select your file from here so predict model boom open it up okay so now you know your way around the application and also how to open files just using the keyboard Wow Let's now take a look at what we can do inside the editor to speed up the process of writing code one of the most important things to learn when writing code is how to select single characters words and whole lines knowing how to do this with the keyboard can really speed up your workflow so here are the basics shift plus right arrow to select single characters option shift plus right arrow to select words and command shift plus right arrow to select whole lines using these commands I can easily Run part of a line to preview the data then run the whole line to store it in a variable then preview just the variable to see if the transformation actually succeeded now if you're not allowed to use the mouse then navigating through a long file with just the arrow keys is pretty annoying luckily there are better ways and you have a few options here first of all you can go all the way down or all the way up to your file by pressing command followed by the down arrow for going down or command followed by the up arrow for going all the way up second if you want to go somewhere in the middle you can hit command G then specify the line number and then hit enter the last option and that is my preferred option is by navigating the symbols within your file and you can do this by hitting command command shift plus period and this will list all the symbols within your script so this will be the variables the classes and also the functions and you can navigate through them by using the arrow keys and then hitting enter so let's say I want to go to the categorical features select it boom here I am another cool feature of Visual Studio code is that you can move stuff around we can just hit option and then use the arrow keys to move it up and down or put it back into place now let's say you want to change this variable name byte data to something more descriptive like daily Bike Share data for example but now we have a problem because it's not only referenced here but throughout the entire file luckily you can probably guess there's a shortcut for that so the way this works is we select the variable name then we hit command option plus F then we type in a new variable name and then we either press enter to go through it one by one or press command plus enter to update everything as once boom done another very powerful feature of vs code is multi-line editing and you activate this by pressing Ctrl option and then using the down and the up arrows select your lines so let's look at an example over here I mean the relevant features let's go down select everything and then we can for example add the prefix then go all the way to the back and add a number or whatever another action that you often have to perform is commenting lines and now of course you can do that by putting in a hashtag in front of a line but there's also an easier way to do that and that is by being on a line and then pressing command plus forward slash to comment the whole line and you can even do this with whole blocks of code so for example we want to comment out this there is also a shortcut to open up your terminal and this is Control Plus backtick and this is convenient when you have to check your environment or install some dependencies with Pip or Kona for example oh yeah and you should also use Snippets which are basically little code templates that you can Define and then insert into your file so for example I have a snippet over here to insert a linear regression model I have a whole video on how to use Snippets so if you don't know what those are I would highly recommend checking it out because these can really speed up your workflow Okay so we've covered a lot in this video and buying now you should know your way around Visual Studio code with the keyboard this is so fast one that I want to show you is the command palette and you can open this up by pressing command shift plus b so command P was for opening files and command shift p will open up the command palette and from here you can basically access anything that is available within Visual Studio code so if you're missing something or you're looking for something have a look over here and just type in what you're searching for and then my final tip for vs code is to explore the official themes that you can change to really alter the look and feel to your liking so you can install these from the extensions over here and I for example really like the atom1 dark team that you're currently looking at combined with the fluid icons that change the look and feel of these icons in the menu bars and then also this material icon team over here that basically changes the icons in your Explorer so these are the settings that I use but there are Endless Options here so explore them and try to find something that you like because after all you should really enjoy working with the tools that you use every day and changing up the appearance and setting up custom keyboard shortcuts and memorizing them can really make the process of writing python code for data science with Visual Studio code more enjoyable that's it for this video now please don't forget to leave a like and also please let me know down in the comments what your favorite tip for fias code is now if you want to learn more about working with data then subscribe to the channel and also check out some of the other videos that will pop up on the screen right now [Music]