I've recently started to use Visual Studio Code when working on PHP code. The editor is amazing right out of the box except for minor quirks. One of those quirks is to do with how it selects words on a double-click, or specifically in my case - how it selects PHP variables.


It is because of that dollar sign in front of a variable that VS Code was selecting everything after the $ when double clicking a variable and ignoring the $ itself. This was very annoying and required manually click-dragging to select a variable, which is of course not as productive.


Luckily there is an easy way to tell VS Code to do the right thing. There is a setting that controls what VS Code considers to be a word separator. There is typically a dollar sign included in this setting, so removing it from the list will make VS Code not consider $ as a separator.




Simply open Settings and add this line:


After that, double clicking a PHP variable will select the entire variable as expected!


-i