✔︎ Last updated on May 4th, 2024
Codeium (not to be confused with Codium.ai) is a coding assistant that’s been generating a lot of buzz with its completely free offering for individuals. It has extensions for most popular text editors and IDEs and even supports a wide range of coding languages!
However, since it’s so new (their website was only registered in May of 2021), there are still some kinks to work out.
One of the issues I ran into was with the keyboard shortcuts on Visual Studio Code. The inbuilt tutorial section, “Codeium University,” had incorrect shortcuts, and sometimes it even showed me Windows shortcuts even though I’m on a Mac.
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To clear up the confusion, I compiled a complete list of Codeium keyboard shortcuts for Mac users working in Visual Studio Code. I have tested all these shortcuts myself, so they are guaranteed to work.
| Command | Keybinding |
| Command Mode | Command + I or Command + Shift + I |
| Open Chat | Command + Shift + A or Control + Option + A |
| Show Next Completion | Option + ] |
| Show Previous Completion | Option + [ |
| Trigger Inline Suggestion | Option + \ |
| Cancel Codeium command | Option + C |
| Diff action accept | Option + A |
| Diff action follow-up | Option + F |
| Diff action reject | Option + R |
I have taken these keybindings straight from the VS Code.
The frustrating part is that some of Codeium’s features clash with other extensions like VSCodeVim. It makes it super hard to use them without reaching for the mouse!
Take the example of Codeium’s command mode (opened with Cmd + I). Normally, you’d hit the Escape key to exit, but VSCodeVim intercepts that key. This leaves you stuck in command mode unless you manually close it with the mouse.
Here’s a demo of what I mean:
I spent hours trying to fix this through settings and keybindings, and surprisingly, a shortcut did work. If you use VSCodeVim and are stuck in the Codeium’s command mode, like me, try pressing shift + enter. You will get out of it. Unsurprisingly, its not customizable (as of now)
I’d have loved if they had made the Codeium command mode toggle-able using the same shortcut (Cmd + I) but I don’t know why they have configured two shortcuts for launching the command mode. Or if they could specify a command (like codeium.closeCodeiumCommand in VS Code to close the command bar, I could trigger it using some other shortcut or at least customize it in keybindings.json file.
I also posted this issue on the VS Code subreddit to get some help in crafting an alternate keybinding. You can follow it here. I also pinged them on Twitter but they haven’t replied so far.
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What do you think? Is there a way around this? If you’ve got a solution, please let me know below or reach out on Twitter (X).