Good morning (@4:13pm here but nobody cares :) )!
So I was just reviewing a file in VSCode on mac and I've noticed some weird behavior in the editor, but fortunately also found how to overcome it completely.
Trigger:
You pressed cmd down arrow to be at the end of a file and then navigate anywhere normally.
Problematic behaviour:
VO starts reading strangely, 99% of the content of a given line is skipped or read in diagonal when pressing up or down arrow, and even with option left or right arrows only random characters of a word are read. TLDR the editor becomes unusable.
How to overcome it:
Simple! I mean it's truly one thing you know and you forget about it after. After pressing cmd down to be at the end of a file, just remember to press left arrow only once, and the problem disappears until you do command down arrow again. The trick always work.
Some people more clever than me can try to guess what's the root cause or whatever, feel free please, I'd be glad to read while not understanding anything (very proudly though!).
Loving my mac nowadays, even if visual studio is virtually windows only now outside winform and windows specifics dotnet is crossplatform so...
Wishing you a great day.
Happy coding!
But don't forget to touch grass once a day. Or more if you can. Empirical proof says it can be helpful.
See ya later on another bug report.
By TheBlindGuy07, 31 January, 2026
Forum
App Development and Programming
Comments
Coding in Swift.
You do any? I know VsCode has plugins for other languages, I played around with the Python extension under Windows for a bit when I ran Windows. I'm kicking around the idea of digging into coding forthe Mac, it's something to do anyway, but I've never used an IDE in my life. I may as well figure out what works from people who know what they're doing, i.e. people who are not me.
Re: Swift
Apple has a free IDE called xcode on the App Store which I believe is the main way to code Swift if you are writing Mac or iOS apps. So if I was starting out, that's what I would try first.
I haven't really used it since needing VoiceOver but I have a feeling that it is usable.
Personally I've never got on with VS Code. But I suspect I'm in a minority.
Anyway, given that since using VoiceOver I have not really used either app very much, it's possible that someone else may come on here and give a more educated opinion.
XCode is quite usable
And because it's native and not a web view it'll always be slightly better, though both are absolutely usable. Even pycharm is quite cool on mac whereas on windows I have never bothered using any IDE with python, my friend notepad++ and cmd to invoke the interpretor and that's it, which was also true for me with c# before MS do their whole dotnet dotnet I didn't bother to learn it until very recently.
Personally I have never used the terminal inside vscode, native OS terminal only on both windows, mac and linux.
Xcode for Swift
Xcode is the only thing I use to write Swift regardless of platform, although I prefer Rust for cross-platform code. Xcode is perfectly capable of working on pure Swift packages, with Vosh being one such example. My personal recommendation these days when it comes to Swift, Objective-C, C, or C++ code targeting Apple platforms, is to actually put everything in Swift packages and only wrap them in Xcode projects when absolutely necessary, like when adding entitlements, customizing the Info.plist file, or preparing for notarization or App Store submission. A fundamentalist can actually embed both Entitlements and Info.plist data into the executable binaries themselves during the code-signing and linking steps of the building process respectively if they really want to (I'm actually shipping a scheme to do code-signing when Vosh is built using Xcode), but at that point they are fighting the tools, not taking advantage of them.
As for the subject of the thread, I don't use or even care about Visual Studio Code myself. It has the advantage of being fully integrated with language services since Microslop created the Language Server Protocol themselves, but at least I am yet to find a way to use it comfortably with VoiceOver, and besides it's not even a native application, so my personal choice is to just avoid it and use TextMate when Xcode is not the right tool.