How can you create multiple cursors in Visual Studio Code

Solution 1:

Press Alt and click. This works on Windows and Linux*, and it should work on Mac, too.

More multi-cursor features are now available in Visual Studio Code 0.2:

Multi cursor improvements
Ctrl+D (Cmd+D on Mac) selects next occurrence of word under cursor or of the current selection
Ctrl+K Ctrl+D moves last added cursor to next occurrence of word under cursor or of the current selection
The commands use matchCase by default. If the find widget is open, then the find widget settings (matchCase / matchWholeWord) will be used for determining the next occurrence
Ctrl+U (Cmd+U on Mac) undoes the last cursor action, so if you added a cursor too many or made a mistake, you can press Ctrl+U (Cmd+U on Mac) to go back to the previous cursor state. Adding cursor up or down (Ctrl+Alt+Up / Ctrl+Alt+Down) (Cmd+Alt+Up / Cmd+Alt+Down on Mac) now reveals the last added cursor to make it easier to work with multiple cursors on more than 1 viewport height at a time (i.e. select 300 lines and only 80 fit in the viewport).

This makes it a lot easier to introduce multiple cursors

* Linux drag-window conflict:

Some distros (e.g. Ubuntu) assign window dragging to Alt+LeftMouse, which will conflict with VSCode.

So, recent versions of VSCode let you toggle between Alt+LeftMouse and Ctrl+LeftMouse under the Selection menu, as detailed in another answer.

Alternately, you could change your OS key bindings using gsettings as mentioned in another answer.

Solution 2:

Multi-word (and multi-line) cursors/selection in VS Code

Multi-word:

Windows / OS X:

Ctrl+Shift+L / ⌘+Shift+L selects all instances of the current highlighted word
Ctrl+D / ⌘+D selects the next instance... and the one after that... etc.

Multi-line:

For multi-line selection, Ctrl+Alt+Down / ⌘+Alt+Shift+Down will extend your selection or cursor position to the next line. Ctrl+Right / ⌘+Right will move to the end of each line, no matter how long. To escape the multi-line selection, hit Esc.

See the VS Code keybindings (OS sensitive)

Solution 3:

May 2017
As of version 1.13 Add multiple cursors with Ctrl / Cmd + Click

VSCode developers have introduced a new setting, editor.multiCursorModifier, to change the modifier key for applying multiple cursors to Cmd + Click on macOS and Ctrl + Click on Windows and Linux. This lets users coming from other editors such as Sublime Text or Atom continue to use the keyboard modifier they are familiar with.

The setting can be set to:

ctrl/Cmd - Maps to Ctrl on Windows and Cmd on macOS.
alt - The existing default Alt.

There's also a new menu item Use Ctrl + Click for Multi-Cursor in the Selection menu to quickly toggle this setting. enter image description here

The Go To Definition and Open Link gestures will also respect this setting and adapt such that they do not conflict. For example, when the setting is ctrl/Cmd, multiple cursors can be added with Ctrl / Cmd + Click, and opening links or going to definition can be invoked with Alt +Click.

With fixing Issue #2106, it is now possible to also remove a cursor by using the same gesture on top of an existing selection.