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In VSCode/VSCodium, you can install a "famous" extension TabOut with > 300K installs at the time of writing. I am not fully sure what it does, although almost every entry in the forum is amazed by it:

The lack of this was the reason I never used VS Code and went to Visual Studio instead.

I came from Sublime Text and tabbing out is the default behavior there.

I have been losing my mind after using Eclipse for centuries and expecting to "tab out" of strings and param lists.

What does it mean/do? I guess it is not to tab out = pay the drinks before you leave the bar. Exits quotes and parentheses nicely (forum entry)? Jumping to the end of an if clause or loop or the like?

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  • When keyboard users speak about using the TAB key for navigation, they often use the word "tab" just like any other motion verb. "Tab over to that field", "tab into this," "tab out of this," "alt-tab to Chrome," etc. Those all mean "to move over/into/out of that thing by means of pressing the TAB key." That sounds like what this is -- you can use it to "tab into" or "tab out" of brackets, quotes, etc.
    – Brandin
    Dec 5, 2022 at 14:43
  • @Brandin I had found "tab out" as a meaning of leaving the open window with Alt+Tab. I still did not know what it would mean to "tab out of strings and brackets", I could only guess how it is at work. If you knew that just from the wording, there might be many more who would understand the wording right away, and that explains why there was no such question in the forum. But I did not understand it, and I might not be the only one.
    – questionto42standswithUkraine
    Dec 5, 2022 at 15:30

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Tabbing out in an IDE/text editor (like VSCodium, Eclipse, Sublime Text, Visual Studio, ...) means pressing the Tab button

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to jump with the cursor to the end of the bracket or other "begin+end thing" you are in. The parameters for this "thing" can be set. Checking the TabOut extension with the default settings, showing it at work when you are inside brackets ():

enter image description here

Pressing Tab a few times:

enter image description here

Toggle TabOut = put the TabOut extension to work:

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Same starting point as above:

enter image description here

Pressing Tab lets the cursor leave the inside of the brackets (the wording is then: you "tab out of the brackets"):

enter image description here

Pressing Tab a few times:

enter image description here

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  • 3
    Note that this kind of thing may interfer with standard IDE key bindings and actions. for instance tab is used for VS/VSCode autocomplete, snippets, etc. so be prepared for that.
    – Frank Thomas
    Dec 4, 2022 at 21:51
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    This extension does not interfere with the standard IDE key bindings. It detects if autocomplete/snippets/etc is active and will use the default behavior.
    – Albert Romkes
    Dec 5, 2022 at 7:05
  • From the forum, a user remarked that you will not have the tab anymore to indent a line that starts with a bracket like () since the cursor will jump into the bracket instead. ... it also brings you into them. It is acting like an undesirable tab-in as well. If you had a line starting with a quote, pressing tab no longer adds an extra tab spacing, but instead moves you inside the quotes now. But I guess you can get around this, and if not, just toggle off the extension while indenting.
    – questionto42standswithUkraine
    Dec 5, 2022 at 15:18
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    That used to be the behavior, but was fixed in a subsequent release
    – Albert Romkes
    Dec 5, 2022 at 15:19
  • I took this out of the question then. There was no remark in the forum that it was fixed.
    – questionto42standswithUkraine
    Dec 5, 2022 at 15:24

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